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The Mongol National Character

July 30th, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Feature:Nations, History

What this is about, including full list.

Genghis Khan was dude who, 700 years ago, totally ravaged China, and who, we were told, 2 hours ago, totally ravaged Oshman’s Sporting Goods. So Sid Meier had to make him and his furry hat one of the iconic Civs in his classic game.

The Mongols did, after all, conquer half the known world and throw the other half into a righteous panic. Genghis was an illiterate military genius with great political savvy, who didn’t believe in the glory of a heroic resistance. If you surrendered your city, you were rewarded and treated well. If you were a patriot who fought to be free, you and your fellow citizens would be collected into a mountain of skulls outside what was left of your city walls within a few weeks. A master of open field warfare who once did a flanking maneuver over hundreds of miles, he soon picked up siege warfare like a natural. His dominant legacy is still a matter of great debate – bloodthirsty conqueror who retarded Asian progress or effective ruler who ensured the security of the Silk Road? Sure, it all ended up with the sacking of the libraries of Baghdad, and eventually the pointless destruction of Timur, who claimed descent from the Great Khan. I suppose you could see the Mughals as an extension of Mongol rule, but they pretty much settled down once Babur took Delhi.

For game designers, the Mongols are the conquerors on horseback. [Read more →]

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Three Moves Ahead Episode 127 – Baby’s First Panzer

July 28th, 2011 by Rob Zacny · Podcast, Three Moves Ahead

ThreeMovesAhead

GWJ’s Cory Banks finally dips his toes in the waters of turn-based wargaming with Matrix / Slitherine’s new Panzer General remake, Panzer Corps. He joins Julian and Rob to talk about wargaming-lite, whether this really improves on Panzer General, and Panzer Corps’ puzzle-based approach to scenario design. Rob realizes a newfound appreciation for daunting complexity.

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Dungeons of Dredmor

July 26th, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · RPGs

I seem to be writing a lot about my failures in gaming lately, and since the alternative to this post was an update on my continuing struggles in racing games, I thought that since roguelikes are designed to kill you, writing about Dungeons of Dredmor (Gaslamp Games) would be less embarrassing. (Because seriously, Tom. Beating my own time? I’m now struggling to finish a rally with both my doors attached. Shift 2 Unleashed seems to be teaching me valuable things, though.)

I’ve written many times about my love of roguelikes, and Dredmor is a roguelike for all intents and purposes. Dungeons and treasure are randomly generated, but have predictable behaviours. There is a basic quest, though you can pick up smaller subquests. The skills you improve are more important, in many cases, than simply leveling up. Food is important. Magic is very powerful if you can survive long enough. And, of course, permadeath. (Though you can turn it off, which is sort of cheating in a roguelike.)

It breaks from roguelikes in some important ways. Items don’t need to be identified – you know what something is as soon as you find it. There aren’t classes, per se – each character is a combination of skills that you choose at the beginning of the game, so a magic using blacksmith is entirely possible, maybe even viable. Food is used to heal, so there is no starvation. There are only ten dungeon levels, so there is actually quite a bit of danger in finishing off a floor before you descend further. Merchants will often offer to sell you all kinds of very powerful items on the top level, though getting the 60,000 gold could be a challenge.

Dredmor is a self consciously cute game. The monsters are cute, it tries to be self effacing in its treatment of the hero and villain, the spells and skills and weapons have wacky names. This becomes background noise after a while. It’s not that the humor wears out its welcome, as much as that it is so constant that it can’t stay fresh. Cute spell names are only cute the first time through. Compare this to something like Magicka, which was chock-a-block with stupid pop-culture references, but they always popped up in odd places and weren’t always waving their hands at you.

But I am really liking Dredmor because I am cursing it regularly. I am dying stupidly, getting killed by the last monster in a monster zoo or running out of healing food just as I decide to open one more room or maybe throwing a poison flask and then walking into the cloud like an idiot. All good roguelikes are typified by giving you memorable deaths that could have simply been avoided by turning around and going downstairs. Or upstairs. Anywhere but where you went. Your goofy looking hero (he looks like Guybrush Threepwood’s douchey older brother) will clutch his gut, wince and faint to the ground.

It’s a light roguelike, of course. There’s only so much you can do in it. This isn’t ADOM with a large universe saving plot or Dungeon Crawl and its dozens of races. It’s a dungeon crawl to the foozle and there isn’t even a great deal of monster variety. But a light roguelike with permadeath is more than enough to keep game sessions short and challenging. It will never replace Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for me, but it’s a nice diversion for now.

If I have one nitpick, though, it’s that the character never changes. If my character inventory says I have a traffic cone on my head and a broken kite shield on my arm, then my character in the game should look like that. That would be worth another five dollars for me.

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The Indian National Character

July 24th, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Feature:Nations, History

What this is about, including full list.

If Civilization has an iconic image that everyone has seen (and, let’s face it, it has many) it is the sneering face of Gandhi warning us to behave ourselves because his words are BACKED WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS. There is a universal cognitive dissonance in seeing the face of active but peaceful resistance to imperialism threatening our empires with atomic annihilation because…well, who knows why? In Civilization II, Gandhi didn’t need much of a reason to hate us.

Gandhi is the father of modern India and the face of the civilization to many strategy gamers, so it’s natural for both designers and players to conflate the great revolutionary’s personality and skills with that of one of the world’s oldest and greatest cultures. But India is a puzzle for many people because our general knowledge of it is so rooted in the present – we assume that there is a single India, the 1960s cemented in many minds a culture of yogis and spiritual thinkers (fitting for the birthplace of both Buddhism and Hinduism – two of the oldest and most enduring faiths) and now we see India as a more free China (populous, technologically sophisticated, the next great power on the horizon.)

Keep these numbers in mind while we talk about what India means. [Read more →]

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Puzzles

July 22nd, 2011 by Troy Goodfellow · Design

I’ll get this right out. I hate puzzles in my strategy games, but I love puzzle games. If a strategy game wants to use puzzles, it has to think of them differently than a true puzzle game does.

Last night, I finally finished Portal 2. I wasn’t sure I would get around to it at all, but my Magicka partner promised that co-op would be great and full of the same hilarious murders we enjoyed in the winter, though I mostly remember her yelling at me to suck less when her wizard exploded because I crossed the streams. Anyway, Portal 2 is a brilliant puzzle game that, like most puzzle games with limited mechanics, gets easier the further you progress. The final chapter and the “boss fight” at the end are more about getting the timing right than actually solving a puzzle, unlike some of the moments you encounter two or three chapters earlier.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game with brilliant writing, amazing visuals and some very clever puzzles. But one of the limitations of all true puzzles is that there is a single answer. Sometimes Portal 2 is like solving a maze puzzle – you know what the end point is going to look like so you just backtrack in small steps until the solution becomes clear. Very rarely were there rooms that had to be worked out forward, step by step.

Another problem with puzzle games is repetition. Portal 2 didn’t have a lot of that, even though the mechanics repeated, they did so in interesting ways. Games like Puzzle Agent, though, will squander good art and a neat setting so they can make you do the same tricks over and over and over. It gets tiring and annoying and makes you wonder just how creative designers are with coming up with puzzles and the like.

In RPGs I like puzzles and riddles a lot. They break from the monotony of killing things, and the good ones are rare enough that they never wear out their welcome. But in strategy games, puzzles remove the single element that makes strategy games strategy games. They replace “find a way to accomplish a goal” with “find the way we have designed for you to accomplish this goal“. You see strategy puzzle design a lot in real time strategy campaigns, where the story doles out new little trinkets or special devices that can only be used in a specific situation. You have to use counterunits religiously, you have to take objectives in a specific order, and you have to use the Gizmo Ex Machina to bring the scenario to a healthy conclusion.

All of this, of course, brings us to Panzer Corps, the new Panzer General remake from Lordz Studios and Matrix/Slitherine. In our podcast on Panzer General, we gave the game a bit of a thrashing in a lot of ways, and it was probably unfair in some respects. But both PG and PC are, at their center, puzzle games – as Tom Chick had to remind a few people a couple of weeks ago.

But these are strategy puzzles, which focus on optimizing your score and moving forward, not merely completing the scenario, and this is what gives the PG/PC structure its compelling power. (Panzer Tactics on the DS was similar in many regards.) Success in a scenario is merely enough to move you on to the next one. Efficient success in a scenario will unlock new units, new missions and, best of all, preserve more of your men for the next fight. Even if you crack a mission and get to Paris before you run out of turns, slowpoking through the Ardennes may have cost you a shot a Britain.

There is a real trap in this setup though. A series of inefficient wins may put you in a situation where you just don’t have the manpower or elite units to win the war. You could hit a roadblock; after all, if you keep bronze medalling everything like a typical Canadian, then you can’t be learning very much and will hit a wall around 1942 that you can’t bust through. The only solution is to go back and retry some scenarios and improve and then hope to move forward. But who has that kind of time and what bad habits have been reinforced by the time you got to Kiev? By saying that any solution counts for something, the PC/PG model can wrap you in a false sense of progress.

I haven’t played a lot of Panzer Corps yet, but I am looking forward to seeing if my puzzle solving skills have been improved by Aperture Science’s testing facilities. Full report from the front soon.

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Three Moves Ahead Episode 126 – Contemporary Antiques

July 21st, 2011 by Rob Zacny · Podcast, Three Moves Ahead

ThreeMovesAhead

PC Gamer EIC Logan Decker joins Rob and Julian for a discussion of Christoph Hartmann’s comments that strategy is not a contemporary genre. They dig into his interview, and what he meant. They also cover other publishing models, and how they stack up to what game publishers do, and discuss how Hartmann’s comments reflect a much broader struggle to figure out what people want in a new media landscape. Does being relegated to a smaller market actually make strategy healthier for those of us who still enjoy it?

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