Elemental and Civilization V come in for a follow-up appointment with Julian, Troy, and Rob. Have the major changes that have been patched into these games translated into major improvements for the player? How much post-release support should players reasonably expect, and what can developers accomplish with it? What flawed games have become great with patching?
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In a recent Three Moves Ahead, I hailed the ability of Revolution Under Siege to make me feel, as a Communist commander, that my decisions did have the future of the Revolution at stake. It really isn’t a role playing game or a true strategy game; it’s a wargame that is about supply lines and command structure and avoiding armored trains. (Sorry, I know they are real but I still think they are funny. Sue me. Maybe we need a “weird weapons” episode.)
Some strategy games work because they let you make that psychic leap from counter pusher to commander. For a wargame to really do it is rare, but it’s not like it is very common even when your role is clear. Alpha Centauri gave you a specific character and ideology to play, but could (before you mastered the math) suck you into its world. But for the most part, a good strategy game doesn’t really transport you into the mind of another.
If you’ve been missing Bruce Geryk’s ramblings about War in the East on Tom Chick’s Quarter to Three, then you’ve been missing what has proven to be an interesting investigation not just of the game, but of what a wargame represents. These have not all been at the forefront of Geryk’s usual genius mishmash of design analysis, history, and random shots at Romanians. But it’s a question that underlies most serious analysis of a game that pretends to represent something larger.
Take the question of victory points. Like most wargames, War in the East gives you locations to seize or hold and assigns points based on how well you do that. You have no choice in determining what the victory locations are; they are almost always based on an historical understanding of what either a king, general or historian decided the focus of the battle was. This is all well and good for pushing you to react to historical pressures, but a certain weirdness can set in.
As Matt Kirschenbaum noted in his essay “War Stories: Board Wargames and (Vast) Procedural Narratives†in the game design anthology Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives
Who is the player in Afrika Korps? Are we adopting the identity of a theater commander like Rommel or Montgomery? This is what the box cover [YOU are in Command] would have us believe. Yet wargames routinely slide between macro- and micro- decision making, and the player’s role is further complicated by the presence of counters that embody the historical identities he or she is putatively assuming. So is the player Rommel or is “Rommel” the counter one is moving across the map?
If the player is Rommel or Montgomery instead of, at the upper level, Hitler or Churchill, then you at least sort of avoid the issue of how to define what victory is. These decisions are above your pay grade and you can shift the blame and move onwards. Because once you get beyond a certain level of command, there is little point in presuming that the victory points laid out are little more than historical abstractions. Leningrad mattered because High Command decided it mattered. If you are under the High Command level, not a problem. If you are the High Command level, then the idea that you can change everything about the war except your objectives makes the whole idea of being High Command a little silly.
It’s a larger problem than the logical mazes that Kirschenbaum lays out. Though a clear identity like those you assume in Alpha Centauri or Crusader Kings or Solium Infernum can help a lot, they aren’t quite enough. Take, for example, the Tropico games, where I never really feel like a Latin American dictator as much as I feel like a gumball machine passing out the right goodies to placate the masses while I push towards the mission objectives. I would argue that as the Civilization series became more complex and personalized around leaders it became even harder to maintain the fiction that you are the cosmic consciousness of a nation. The Total War games work for breeding attachment to specific generals or units, but have never really carried me into that mental space where I feel like I am a king or daimyo. (Rome: Total War would sometimes take me there, however.)
Sometimes I think that the more alien and original the setting, the easier it is to feel like you are a part of it. No other game lets me be Trotsky, so there is a further incentive in Revolution Under Siege to buy into the conceits of the role playing. The repetitiveness of traditional real time strategy, however, makes it hard to feel like I am a Zerg commander or Greek king or Russian general; the mechanics are too familiar to really get invested in the setting. This is probably one reason why RTSes include story based campaigns; there is a desire to build that connection between the world and the player.
I’ve written before about how The Sims has this effect on me. It is probably one of the only strategy games where you can take on multiple roles and feel invested in every single one. It’s a game that defies the idea that clarity breeds connection. It remains a singularly amazing piece of game design that no one has really been able to ape successfully.
So help me out, readers. When and why do you feel that connection between content, goals and role in a game? I refuse to believe it’s magic.
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Here come the creeps, led by Rob and Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Quintin Smith! Fortunately, they encounter a maze of discussion and towers of topics. Inspired by first-person tower defender Sanctum and tower attacker Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Quinns and Rob explore how these games change the tower defense formula, and what about that formula needed changing? Are we doing a disservice to a neat mechanic by insisting that it is a genre? Why are we continually drawn in by games we often find shallow and unsatisfying? Is tower defense really about destruction, or is there an under-served creative aspect to these games?
A lot of games and pieces come up for discussion here, so brace yourself for a link attack.
Quinns’ Sanctum Wot I Think
Troy’s reactions to Anomaly: Warzone Earth
Rob, two years ago, on tower defense games
Quinns on Ace of Spades
3MA on AI War
Rob’s “excessively positive” Dungeons review
The Verdun game Rob couldn’t remember is The Trench
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What this is about, including full list.
What most gamers know about German history fits into a spasm of madness between 1933 and 1945. Though it goes too far to call this decade-plus a fluke (Nazism and the revanchism it embraced had a strong cultural and historical background, not unique to Germany), the horrible excesses and crimes of the period are not a great place to look for portrayals of the German character. For a long time, wargames perpetuated the myth of the German super soldier (especially SS units) and many games set in World War II gave Germany production bonuses to capture the idea of Nazi efficiency (another long exploded myth about the war; German economy and industry was a corrupt and chaotic mess most of the time.)
But this idea of amazing German production capacity in the war, its rapid industrialization in the late 19th century and Germany’s quick recovery from the devastation of WW2 has given strategy game developers something to work with, a national characteristic that casts Germany as a super producer. Efficient, disciplined, with a strong work ethic.
Or, as Rise of Nations dubs it, The Power of Industry. In that game, Germany is given a huge resource advantage – extra goods when they complete building, cheaper and more easily available industrial bonus structures (smelter, lumber mill, granary) and a small bonus to resource gathering per city that, over the course of a game, will have Germany churning out their superior infantry and tanks. And they get to build aircraft faster, too. Germany is an assembly line nation, even for those ancient and medieval periods when Germans were known mostly for resisting Roman rule and then resisting religious rule from Rome. Where we see ancient traits carried forward for Egypt and Greece, modern Germany imposes its reputation on the heroes of Teutoberger Wald and the Holy Roman Emperors that had a nation, but not a country.
Like many so-called national powers, this is a trait that has to go to some nation if you insist on distinguishing races and factions by the powers they have in a game. Someone has to be the ant, working hard and making things faster or accumulating resources faster than anyone else. Since Germany’s Golden Ages (Unification to World War I and the post-war recovery) are both based strongly on turning non-productive areas of a nation into modern factories, this is a trait that comfortably carries through many nation based game systems.
In Civilization 4, both German leaders have important traits for economic and industrial management (Frederick’s Organized trait keeps the cost of expansion down with faster factory construction and Bismarck’s Industrious trait means faster wonders and faster forge construction; those hammers add up.) In Age of Empires 3, the German settler wagon is a stronger and more efficient resource gatherer. In Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, buildings go up faster and food and wood are collected more quickly. While you can sometimes find these sorts of bonuses present to other nations as well, few of them are as consistently portrayed as economic/industrial juggernauts.
Germany is, therefore, the quintessentially modern European nation, which makes sense given its relatively late and quickly stable unification. And the modern Germany we know, as I said at the top, is Nazi Germany. If there is an option to move your in-game Germany into modernity, you will have a special tank. The Panzer has become as synonymous with German military history as the legionnaire is to Roman. One is just another tank, and the other is just another swordsman, but the way they were used and their central role in expanding an empire (if shortlived in the German case) makes it difficult to think of the Nazi German Army as anything less than a vast superstructure to support their armored divisions.
Wargames have a lot of fun with trying to represent German tank abilities. There is always the math of armor and penetration and speed. Then you have the limited numbers of the really awesome Tigers, though one of those in Combat Mission was enough to ruin your day assuming it didn’t break down.
The tank has become emblematic of the whole blitzkrieg strategy, even though that strategy also relied on air power and fast moving infantry, not to mention all that legendary German efficiency in keeping the supply lines stable. It’s not that German tanks were necessarily the best tanks, nor that their tankmen were necessarily the best at that. The tank is the default German weapon because the German Army of that period is given a lot of credit for “discovering” the tank’s potential. (We can do back and forth over how smart Guderian really was; well someone can, I know just enough to know that I don’t know enough.)
And it’s here, in the modern industrial Germany, that we lose sight of how there was a time that France was the militaristic bully of Europe that needed to be contained and Germany the fractured romantic nation of Schiller and Goethe and Beethoven. As it should be clear to readers by now, I don’t believe that any of this national culture stuff is real or innate, but game designers who want to differentiate their nations will fall into common understandings of who a people are. We have decided that the Germans are modern builders with great tanks – that is the Germany that players know and that designers can easily translate.
Next up, a decidedly not modern nation (in game terms), the founders of democracy, the Greeks.
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Rob is pleasantly surprised by Revolution Under Siege and rounds up Troy Goodfellow and Broken Toys‘ Scott Jennings to talk about it. What is the context for a Russian Revolution game, and how does Revolution Under Siege communicate that? Is the AGE system a good one for this kind of game, and why is it such a turn-off for some people? Most importantly, how the hell does an armored train work? Why wouldn’t you just stay away from the tracks? Seriously guys, what the hell?
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This week I started a PBEM game of War in the East with Bruce Geryk. Because apparently my mess of a life had room for one more colossal failure, I opted to play the Soviets.
The Soviet opening position in Operation Barbarossa in WitE is a little bit of panic. You will lose hundreds of thousands of men on the first turn no matter what happens, and there isn’t a lot you can do – your troops aren’t ready and the Nazis go first. Once the Soviet turn begins, it’s a matter of seeing what has survived and deciding which troops will take the turn to move from reserve status to something less crappy, and which will just hightail it out of Ukraine.
The decision to retreat is not one that is often imposed on strategy gamers, but it is really central to the wargame experience. Most strategy games make it pretty clear that sitting on the defense and waiting for an attack is usually not the best strategy – sure wait for and absorb the first assault but have your counter attack planned and you’ll be fine.
Wargames, however, especially long ones, are much more likely to force you to reconsider whether to hold the line against a stronger enemy or pull back to a better defensive position. Because the scale is smaller, you can think about whether a Fabian strategy makes sense against overwhelming odds or whether you can persuade a unit or two to block a narrow pass to stall an enemy advance.
“In yon straight path a thousand may well be stopped by three” and all that.
The great thing about Operation Barbarossa for a Soviet general is that you can retreat forever if you know where you are retreating too and for what purpose. And that’s always the challenge for a delaying strategy – when and where do you decide to take your stand. Unlike a strategy game, you can’t wait for production points to get exhausted, just fuel. You can’t hope for an ally to absorb some of the heat, because you are it.
So far, my plan is to run like hell away from the advance and see what happens to his supply lines. And yeah, I know he’ll read this.
Screenshots and casualty reports to follow.
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