Troy and Rob start the show with a talk about what Derek Paxton’s move to Stardock means for Elemental and the future of Stardock.
They then segue into a discussion about logistics and supply rules constrain the player in interesting ways. Rob tells another wargame anecdote, we debate whether an AI really understands supply rules and again talk about the best RTS ever made.
This is the October pledge drive, as well, so stay tuned to the end for another plea for money. Not for beer.
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Kevin Hutchins is probably one of my oldest continual online friends. We made contact on the old Home of the Underdogs forum, he has had Thanksgiving at my house, and we’ve talked on and off for years.
Still, I needed him to write a more thorough bio note, because what do you say about a guy who has moved from job to job and never become less cynical?
“Kevin is a critic of some description, a gamer of every description, a writer of no description and no taste. He is a good source of strong opinions and fiber. He was raised to live a life at sea, but believes that Flash of Steel is too good a cause to abandon for a life among the waves.”
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You guys remember Spaceballs? Maybe I’m miscalculating FoS’s target demographic, but I’m betting you have. More than once. Apparently that movie was only funny when I was 8, because a recent attempt to watch it led only to embarrassment for everyone involved. I admit I laughed, once again, when Dark Helmet’s ship took well over a minute to cross the screen, in a mockery of the opening of “Star Warsâ€. I mean, ships that size just don’t happen, except as comic relief, after all.
Or do they?
True story: I caught wind of a game called Star Ruler by Blind Mind Studios about a month ago, while I was digging around for what was new in the space 4x genre. Like a lot of folks, I really dug Sins of a Solar Empire and what it brought to the table: real-time gameplay, lasers, death beams, giant capital ships and planet-busting bombardments. Everyone loves that stuff, especially in a well-paced, epic setting. It pushed the limits of what many people considered a moribund genre, brought it back to life, and set the foundations for what was to come after.
Enter Star Ruler. If there was one thing that was missing in Sins, it was designing your own ships. A fair number of people were disappointed that one of the genre’s staples, a part of space 4x from the very beginning, wasn’t there; you had a set roster of ships, and that was it. After a while, games become somewhat stylized rock-paper-scissors affairs, as opposed to coming at your opponent out of the blue with an unexpected ship design. This is where Blind Mind’s project really shines. Their freeform ship creation, which is not limited by size or scope, is truly limitless. Not sure what I mean? Let me put it this way: would you like a ship that is the size of a small sun? No problem, just tell the ship designer and it will happily scale up the components and the material costs to build it. Would you like it to house a fleet of planet-sized ships? Easytown. Just add on a ship bay and load them in. Need to give them some asteroid size missiles to shatter your opponent’s planets? By all means, just change the scale of the ship, swap around the components, and cause the bowels of your dreaded opponent to loose themselves. Ships are fully scalable from size 0.1, which is… I don’t know, about the size of Boston? To size “32 Bit Integer†which is like 2^31 or something. That is huge, and good luck to you if you want to try and build that monster. Most people don’t get past size 100,000 which I assure you is plenty, plenty big. Keep in mind that weapon power also scales with size, and I think you can probably figure out that bigger is, more often than not, better.
The game itself is real-time like Sins and contains all the basic staples of the genre; research trees (which also scale and never ends; you can research a tech forever and get additional bonuses, as long as you have the research capacity to get it done before your dying day), colonization, evil AI empires to conquer, and resource gathering. All pretty standard and basic… which is actually the major drawback to this project; it is a no-frills experience to be sure. I waited until a half-dozen patches had come around to say anything about the game because, to be honest, the first incarnations were virtually impossible to enjoy due to bugs, crashes, missing features, broken multiplayer, brain dead AI and simple a lack of things to do besides build alarmingly large ships. But soft, my readers! I am happy to say that Blind Mind is made up of some hard-working hombres and they are gradually adding meat to what is turning out to be a very interesting expansion of the genre. As of writing (patch 1.0.0.8), you can now have a functional multiplayer game, and single player isn’t quite as lonely and dire as it used to be, with AI opponents doing amazing things like attacking you on occasion, generally slowing down your mega-ship projects with some frequency.
In any case, keep your eyes open for the new stuff being added to this game, and if you’re the adventurous type looking for a new flavor for an old dog (that’s a saying, right?), pick it up for cheap on Steam or Blind Mind’s website and give it a try. It’s an ugly duckling for sure, but we all know how that story ended, don’t we?
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Jeff Petraska is a long-time board and computer gamer, and has written articles over the years for Fire & Movement, The General, and C3i magazines. He sent me a long email full of questions last week, and I thought it would work much better as a full post than as an exchange between us. As with all guest blogs, I don’t endorse everything Jeff says here, but it’s food for thought.
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“Why did the author write this story?â€
That question was my most hated question throughout my school years. And you knew it was coming, too. Whenever you got a reading assignment in English class, whether book or short story, you could count on that question being the very first one you’d have to answer when your reading was done.
I hate to admit it, but answering that question over and over actually taught me something. It eventually drove home the point that every piece of literature has a point, a message, an underlying theme. There really are reasons why the authors write stories. And that observation is not just applicable to writers of fiction, either. Non-fiction authors have individual viewpoints, perspectives, and messages that underlie their work as well. For example, the underlying message behind Clay Blair’s Hitler’s U-Boat War
is that the Germans never really came close to severing the so-called Atlantic lifeline between North American and Britain, in spite of popular perception. The underlying message behind John Lundstrom’s Black Shoe Carrier Admiral
is that Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher was unfairly maligned, both during the war and in the histories written afterwards.
Which leads me to ask a similar question: “Why did the designer design this game?†[Read more →]
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This will probably be my last word on Civ 5 for a while on the blog, but if any of my colleagues want to use this platform to hold forth, I won’t stop them.
I’m working on a short strategy guide on Civ 5, and to be honest it is a bit difficult to write. There is no ideal build order, a lot of the game remains underdocumented, and so many of the strategies depend on which nation you use and when you start planning your strategy.
This is really the first Civ where you need to pick which victory condition you are going for in your opening turns. Once your empire gets larger than say, five cities, a culture victory is almost impossible unless you have some magic luck with being left alone. A domination victory means you either need to play on a Pangaea map or hope there are still capitals left to conquer when you cross the seas – unlikely. You can’t move from a culture to a science victory easily – the latter needs a larger empire. Some nations are better suited to one victory than another.
There was some of this in Civ 4. If you had multiple religions, it made sense to always put your cathedrals in the same three cities and then shoot for those wonders that had culture multipliers (Hermitage, Broadway, Hollywood, Rock & Roll, etc.). But this is an extreme version of that.
As I said on the show two weeks ago, for the first time you cannot measure your general progress by the size of your empire. A small empire might be the best choice if you want that Utopia Project and even there you want to play India probably since it gets no penalty for large cities, but a double penalty for every new one. Infinite City Spam was reduced in Civ 4 by upkeep costs; in Civ 5, happiness is the problem and that keeps you away from the Golden Ages you need to keep things moving efficiently. (I can’t remember a time when Civ was so reliant on the Golden Age concept for victory.)
In some ways, this makes Civ more a series of achievement centered challenges than a game where you adjust your strategy depending on your circumstances. You sit down and say “I will try for the diplomatic victory” (which requires a lot of gold) or “I haven’t tried the Japanese Domination Strategy” yet. My favorite strategy games aren’t like that; they are evolving worlds that force me to change course or take advantage of new opportunities. A weakened enemy is no longer attractive prey if I want to get that culture win. If I had wanted a science win, I would have had to expand early and fast. Without a gold centered strategy, the diplomatic victory is hard to earn.
In multiplayer, I can see how this might be interesting, at least if MP wasn’t so frustrating. Each empire trying to plan out its own strategy while the other players try to subvert those plans. But the AI still plays Civ 5 like Civ 4, preferring to expand at all costs. An India that owns an entire continent will not get anywhere fast because of the happiness penalty.
It’s only been a few weeks and the community forums are still fighting over what the best options are for each nation. There are some ridiculous examples of people finding ways to break the system, but by and large there is still a lot of debate about how to face this new world of Civ.
If I’m missing something, let me know. Because this is a Civ I barely recognize at times.
150 hours played, btw.
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Julian and Rob are joined by Rob Daviau (Hasbro) and Chris Remo (Irrational) to talk about how games let us give in to our worst impulses and betray our friends. Neptune’s Pride, Risk, Weinhandler, Starcraft and a dozen other games come up.
Rob sounds very NPR in the intro. Then the whole thing goes to hell.
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In August, we had the inaugural local TMA/FoS meetup in the Washington DC area. It was a small group, but a good one. Great conversation, good beer, overpriced food. There was talking about gaming, science, sports, colleges, the works. I had enough buttons for everyone, too.
It was suggested that we make it a seasonal thing, and I think that’s a great idea, so the second meet up will be on November 20. Stay tuned for updates and locations. By scheduling this far ahead, it gives me time to find a restaurant that will be convenient but not too pricey – Gordon Biersch was excellent food, but the entrees were a little much for a casual gathering.
Spread the word, bring your friends. Location TBD.
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