Troy Goodfellow

This week, Bill Abner from No High Scores returns to the show along with new guest Dirk Knemeyer from Conquistador Games. What do they have in common? Both have better OOTP league teams than Troy does. The trio talk about the improvements in OOTP 13, what makes the OOTP series so special and enduring – if sometimes confusing, and why sports management games are some of the purest strategy games available. Bill sets Dirk straight on some things, Dirk complains about not finding stuff and Troy owns up to the worst free agent signing in baseball history. Listen Here. iTunes And support Dirk's Kickstarter for Road to Enlightenment!

PAX East 2013 was host to the second ever Three Moves Ahead panel, and this time we took on interface design. Troy and Rob were joined by Rob Daviau (IronWall), Eric Lee Smith (Shenandoah) and Nels Anderson (Klei) Listen Here. Get the PowerPoint slides here.

We need to get Bruce mod status and a less shadowy avatar. I didn't have a lot to contribute, but I love talking to small creators as much as I do the big devs - one reason Vic Davis is always welcome. You learn a lot about business and design on both sides.

Last seen way back in Episode 37, Chris Park from Arcen Games returns to the show to talk to Troy, Michael Hermes and Shannon Quesnel about AI War: Fleet Command on the occasion of the release of Version 6.0. Chris talks about how theme and vision dictate patching, the particular skills that a hardcore niche audience can bring to an indie game and how Steam is the best promotional tool they have. Check it out over here.

Troy and Julian welcome freelance writer and co-proprietor of the Shut Up, Sit Down Show, Paul Dean, to talk about house rules and modding in board games. Why do we do it? What counts as a mod of a board game? And how do you get other people to play them? Creativity, design, drinking - Troy is good at one of these things, but a fine chat is had. Listen Here.

I should definitely give Decisive Campaigns a try. How many East Front games can I possibly handle at one time?

I would love to do another Unity of Command show and maybe get Tomislav on. That will be a new year thing at the earliest though.

Troy and Bruce welcome original panelist Tom Chick back to the show to talk about solitaire boardgames, starting with the new Phantom Leader for iPad and then roaming through Nemo's War, Levee En Masse, some Lovecraftian thing and Ambush. What makes a solitaire board game distinct from a computer game played against an AI? When do theme and production values matter if it's just you? Plus the return of the Geryk outro tunes. Here is the show. Phantom Leader on iTunes Shut Up Sit Down Show on Phantom Leader and Ambush Elder Sign Levee En Masse Nemo's War

Dave Heron and Jon Shafer return to the show to talk about XCom: Enemy Unknown with Julian and Troy. They talk about the streamlining Firaxis has done to the franchise and how it has paid off. How do the strategic and tactical levels meld? Is the voice acting any good? How replayable is it? And listen to their inevitable list of nitpicks. Troy's thoughts on XCom, Rob and Joe Robinson talk XCom and Rob argues in favour of its simpler design Listen Here

Same. Give me some assault run-and-gun people and I am set for a while with a single sniper in the back. But I think every class has its role. A support with medic powers has saved me more than once. And yeah, snipers with a super kill shot can winnow down the enemy pretty damned fast. But you never want all assault, or all sniper. There are enough other skills for the other classes to make a full complement of one or another a recipe for disaster in the long run, and I think that is a testimony to XCom getting it right.

Yeah, this was hardly the Bruce-iest Bruce that ever Bruced up a podcast. His questions were critical, they did get good answers, and that's kind of why many people listen to our show. We try (not always successfully) to be respectful, but 3MA has never been about just letting developers say whatever they want and market the game. There's been an entire year long ad campaign for that. This was a chance for two people who know and love XCom to talk about the design changes and try to get answers about why the changes were made and that was that. Jake answered them well and to my satisfaction. (And yes, he is a regular listener to the podcast. In fact, the development community in general was an early adopter of 3MA precisely because we treat design seriously and don't just go "awesome or not awesome?" in our chats.) And keep in mind that you are allowed to be critical of things you love! Saying a bad thing about one part of media does not always mean that you are making a judgment that poisons the whole.

This week, Troy, Julian and Bruce welcome back frequent guests Rob Daviau and Bill Abner to talk about the touchy subject of trying to teach games. Though the focus is on board gaming, there are useful lessons about how to approach communication, building the right mindset for the pupil and the challenges of trying to read, teach, play and compete all at once. Listen

Note that he never suggests calling Rob an idiot. Just sayin'

The one thing about many roguelikes (and Spelunky and Isaac qualify, though maybe not for this point) is that there is always the problem of the road not traveled. How many times have you passed on going to a store because you wanted a little more scrap before you went shopping? And then when you turned around to leap back, it was too late? Or went to a store and had to either buy that pike beam or patch your hull - you couldn't do both. Maybe the game could have been won if you looked in one store and not the other. But you choose. You always choose. And there's no way to no one way or another. Unless you want to always have enough money and always know that you can get what you want at a store, then games like this will sometimes put you in a really crap situation. Like facing a boss in Titan Quest and realizing you sold all your lightning resistant armour. Or equipping an artifact sword in ADOM and learning it is cursed, but you have an illiterate character that can't read spells and has to find a priest to fix that. This game can be frustrating and annoying, but I never get so annoyed that I just stop, like I do with Dungeons of Dredmor - also quite an unfair game at times, but with more room for you to customize your character and break the system a little. I think this is why they keep changing it in updates. FTL games are short, certainly too short to get too annoyed by. And I've only hit the final battle a couple of times. Yeah, the AI sometimes does some weird things, but I think the ion bombs in a room (or sometimes off the starboard bow) are a way to make the AI 'miss' from time to time. Is it a slot machine? A little, but so is Diablo and Torchlight, but they are longer games and can't afford to have you crap out in level 1. But people DO improve while playing this game. Is FTL simple? Absolutely. This is a not a game full of depth and amazement. It could be just another story generating system. Some people will burnout or scum save or whatever. I think that it is an elegant game that says a lot about design, user interface, importance of information and how to keep recurring "adventure" bits interesting. I won't persuade you like it or tell you that you are having fun when you're not. After 50 hours in a game you don't like much, you know how you feel.

Yep, some battles are unwinnable with whatever gear you've found and that's the luck of the draw. Some tough battles you can win with clever energy distribution or a solid plan of cycling your weapons and shields. But sometimes you see a centaur hunter on level 2 of the dungeon and you are screwed. Roguelikes do not play fair. The fact you can farm systems pretty efficiently in FTL makes it much fairer than it could be. DO NOT rush for the exit - spend as much time as you can in a zone before you have to leap out.

I honestly can't take anyone that uses the prequel movies as evidence very seriously, I'm afraid. And if you want really epic battles of maneuver, then this is not the game for you. It's a matter of taste and opinion, of course, though I do think that FTL is a game that is affordable and significant enough in its purity that everyone should at least take a look at it, even if it's just in blog posts or on Youtube. But it's too dismissive to just say this is an optimization equation, because it isn't. These are judgments you make on the fly, you can't optimize everything, and - as I said on the show - you sometimes have to decide to run even if that means losing the chance for extra scrap, having taken a beating for nothing. Yeah, there's luck. FTL may not be to your taste, but it's like a Baldur's Gate mage battle compared to the running and dodging you might see in Skyrim; both very different ways of doing medieval fantasy battles, but the the measure/counter measure stuff in FTL and BG has a rhythm and can get frantic even if you pause. It's a simple game, but that's part of why it's so amazing. I can't count the number of devs in my twitter stream who are kicking themselves for not thinking of this first. It wouldn't be too hard to imagine a more complex and timing/reflex dependent FTL, but it would be a quite different game.

With everyone very busy and very tired, a shorter and smaller show than usual this week. Troy welcomes Pokemon trainer and DS guru Nadia Oxford to the show to talk about the weird mixture of Pokemon and Nobunaga's Ambition in Pokemon Conquest. How does it differ from other Pokemon games? Do the strategic and tactical levels work? As the 3DS slowly pushes the original out of the way, what is legacy of the DS as a strategy platform? Nadia's Pokemon Conquest review Listen here:

Sixth Beatle Soren Johnson returns along with new guest, Cliff Harris from Positech - designer of Gratuitous Space Battles and the new Gratuitous Tank Battles. This week, how does the idea of unit customization fit with general design principles? At what point is this mechanic an intrusion into good 4x game design? Where do designer and player expectations collide? Listen Rob's column on this issue at Gamespy

Tom Chick comes back to the show to join Rob and Troy for a look back at one of the great real time strategy series – Timegate’s Kohan games. What made Kohan unique and what games, if any, have followed on its original ideas? Is Kohan 2: Kings of War really an inferior sequel? Cities as offensive weapons, the tricks around force posture and the mysteries of who the Kohan are are explored. Also, another one of Tom’s stupid quizzes. Listen here. Troy’s Kohan essay from the defunct decade series

Sorry to hear that Civ 5 broke your heart like that. I know a lot of people that share your opinion and keep playing 4. I just can't go back to stacks of doom on tiles, though I really miss the Civ 4 Civic System.

I miss global warming! Too easy to just fire off the nukes in 5 with no consequences.

Yep. Civ IV advanced the idea a lot - and I think it's gone a small step back in Civ V, where only really the engineer and scientist are really great. Now the artist is the only one that can spawn golden ages, but the tiny culture bomb he had is gone. The merchant is easy money, but takes some walking to do so.

Great People were in Civ 3 - Great Leaders could form armies (super units that combined three like units) or rush Wonders. And yeah, culturally expanding borders with territory you couldn't cross was in 3, but it was very easily exploited. Rights of Passage were easy to negotiate and you could usually fine a safe spot from which to launch a sneak attack or cram a settlement. There were lots of empires that had Swaziland territories in the middle of them.

It was a long time ago, but IIRC, Civ 3 wasn't greeted with open arms at the beginning.

I sort of tried to make this point - Civ V is a very different game than IV and not necessarily a worse one, though I think IV's civics system opens up the gameplay in ways that the perk social policy system in V does not. It's not as great a break as Civ Revolution was, but along the same lines, it is clearly descended from but answering different questions than the other Civs were. There is a lot of room for both IV and V, and V is such a radical departure for the series in so many ways, that it's easy to see where it would turn off long time players and also take more time to mature as a game - remember how "black box" everything was at launch? You knew nothing about what your enemies were thinking or doing until they did it, which was certainly a step back. That said, I only play V now for the most part, unless it's a mod or something for IV. I can't go back to stacks of doom. I can't go back to culture bombs and unhappiness in cities and riots. V is a beautiful bunch of systems that I think show the direction that Civ can go. Oh, and keep the stories coming! Love reading these.