Troy Goodfellow

Thanks for the reports everyone. We're on it and hope to fix it later today!

This was a great show.

Rob/Troy. Not Tom. Oh god, not Tom.

Ugh, sorry about that. Yeah, real time game. We've done the previous two Hegemony games, so I guess we forget that not everyone has listened to all of them. Will do better in the future. Thanks.

God I hate those shows. There's one on Netflix called ANCIENT BLACK OPS and I know that if I ever decide to open this scotch and go nuts one night, I will hatewatch that for hours until my twitter feed is nothing but a foaming mouth of gibberish. I am totally fine - in a game - with abstracting a lot of the quality issues. I mean, you have to, right? You can reflect the general level of skill or equipment by assigning higher values (the Great Battles of History games give bonuses to Cretan Archers and Balearic Slingers over their more amateur equivalents, for example). But you are right that ancient war was such an amateur operation most of the time. Even the celebrated Persian immortals, often held up as some elite infantry unit, were probably just elite relative to the mass of Persian levies - they were the permanent core unit of the army, used for bodyguard or capital protection most of the time. As armies became more professional, the idea of what an "elite" unit was changed and the Immortals take on this veneer of being as tough as a well-trained hoplite phalanx, when they probably weren't. (You see this odd nature of eliteness trickle down to the Praetorian Guard in Rome, which was never considered an elite military unit. They were politically and socially elite, simply the bodyguard to the Imperial family and its interests. But a lot of games want to use the name Praetorian to signify some type of super legion, instead of just the one that happened to be around Rome and so could toss politics on its ear.)

Former Creative Assembly man RT Smith will soon release Oriental Empires, a TotalWar-like that promises to cover Chinese war from the Shang to the Ming. I have low expectations, but am curious.

If you've missed Bruce's earlier videos - two on Dien Bien Phu games - you can find them on his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/chetlo/videos or his own site: http://www.wargamespace.com

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We didn't even touch on the Single Player realm quests, because you need to be at a Wizard rank to get those - and none of us are there yet. But I like Chaos Reborn quite a bit.

Yes, Rob. Check out Thea. Not entirely sold on it, but it does a ton of New Things.

Lee is a wonderful guest and I don't think anyone out there is better at turning air war history into interesting boardgame mechanics. And that voice...

God, there's a new Anno, isn't there. SO MANY GAMES. Martin is a great guy and a Canadian, so double plus awesome.

Rob will have the final say on this, but I'm thinking we do a poll in a few weeks. And yes, Chaos Reborn is a thing.

Yep, none of our new monthly podcasts (except for the new Q&A) will be exclusive. Basically, patronage is a way for listeners to show their appreciation and contribute to the "common good" and expansion of the show in new directions. They may get rewards that are nice - we've taken suggestions before but never polled our audience for their preferences - but that don't stick essential parts of the 3MA experience in a walled garden.

Just after we recorded, Soren Johnson asked if we'd like to talk to the designer. Too late for the show, but something to think about for a future episode for sure!