{"id":3372,"date":"2011-08-24T20:34:01","date_gmt":"2011-08-25T01:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=3372"},"modified":"2011-09-03T15:47:45","modified_gmt":"2011-09-03T20:47:45","slug":"sandboxes-of-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2011\/08\/24\/sandboxes-of-peace\/","title":{"rendered":"Sandboxes of Peace"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before heading out to the Penny Arcade Expo, I thought I should boot up Supreme Ruler: Cold War<\/em> – a game that I have been putting off for a long time. If you’re not familiar with the Supreme Ruler<\/em> series, the games are from Canadian developer Battlegoat and until now have looked at a near future of microstates and constant war. SR: Cold War<\/em> is their first attempt at an historical setting for their style and it should be a great setting for a strategy game. Twilight Struggle is a great board game, there are lots of great war games, and even the Rise of Nations<\/em> Cold War scenario was a better than average RTS scenario.<\/p>\n

Now I’m only still dabbling in SR: Cold War<\/em>, so this isn’t a review and it won’t be one, but in some ways the game shows up one of the great difficulties of a sandbox game in the post-war era, and it’s something we’ve talked a little bit about on the podcast. Unless you play one of the really great powers, there really isn’t a lot to do and, since the game has no in game tutorial, and my Steam version has no manual (will check Gamersgate later for sure), I wasn’t quite sure what my 1949 Canada should be doing besides trading arms designs with other middle powers and turning New Brunswick into an industrial wonderland. If I had chosen Turkey or Portugal or India, I’m not sure my options would have been any clearer.<\/p>\n

Strategy games presume conflict, and the Supreme Ruler<\/em> system has a lot of conflict built into it. You build specific types of units, army base placement matters, and you even need military support to stay in power – especially in a country where the civilian power structure might not be stable. So Canada was building tanks and boats and oil fields and hydro plants, but once I had them I had no idea what the next step would be.<\/p>\n

We often look at sandbox games as those where you can set your own goals and do whatever you want. The Sims, SimCity, Europa Universalis, Dwarf Fortress<\/em>…but really the freedom is a bit of an illusion. You can do whatever you want, yes, but it’s not like the game is not suggesting goals to you or nudging you to try different things. Every new neighbor or unlocked building or National Idea slot or rich vein of copper is a reminder of a new path for you. You do choose your own goals, but these goals are often presented to you so deftly and subtly that you don’t always notice how skillfully the game design is poking you forward.<\/p>\n

The Prospect of Perpetual Peace in a sandbox geopolitical game is a killer. If I had started with the USA or USSR in a proper campaign game, then I could have chosen one of a dozen victory conditions and moved forward there. But, ironically, that sounded too daunting for my first time out with SR: Cold War<\/em>. I chose a middle power and found myself staring at budgets and resource nodes and wondering if I had to plan for an election or not. Should I just build a lot of oil fields? I don’t really have an independent foreign policy, do I? I hardly have an army or navy that can back my words anyway.<\/p>\n

And besides, that’s not what countries do now. As violent and bloody as the second half of the 20th century was, it was also the first point in human history where it was accepted that you couldn’t just use your army to grab someone else’s land and expect the world to be OK with it; it’s not that this never happened between 1945 and 1999, but much more often than not, the world stood up and said that this sort of thing just wasn’t done any more.<\/p>\n

Geopolitical games assume that there is some sort of competition between nations, but if every nation is pursuing a different minigoal, it makes it very hard to be sure just whether my economic planning has any purpose beyond bettering the situation in Kicking Horse Pass.<\/p>\n

So, clearly, when I get back from Seattle, I have to start with the campaign – not the sandbox. I have to master the more tense goal oriented play before I can think about my beloved self-motivated but game directed play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before heading out to the Penny Arcade Expo, I thought I should boot up Supreme Ruler: Cold War – a game that I have been putting off for a long time. If you’re not familiar with the Supreme Ruler series, the games are from Canadian developer Battlegoat and until now have looked at a near […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-So","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3372"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3372"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3399,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3372\/revisions\/3399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}