Rob Zacny

Klei's Nels Anderson and Firaxis' Scott Lewis join Rob and Troy to talk about fog of war and hidden information in game design. They talk about Mark of the Ninja and how information-gathering becomes a key game phase, and how games like Civilization use fog of war as a way to keep the player focused on a small, manageable area at the start of the game. The group discuss other ways to represent information-gathering, touching on games like Wargame, XCOM, Panzer Corps, and even 2006's Chromehounds. Apologies for any audio issues. We lost Scott Lewis' audio track to a glitch. Listen

So having a sniper freak out and kill another soldier from across the map in a fit of panic sounds pretty crummy to me. But yeah, that story doesn't quite tally with my experience. Panicking troops almost always either cower, try to flee, or blast the enemy that's scaring them. I have had maybe one rookie solider turn around and fire at another squad member. The exception being mind-control. Mind control induces panic and, unfortunately, the object of that panic is usually the mind-controlled soldier. Frustrating to watch a rookie headshot an elite veteran that you could have rescued three seconds later by shooting the psy unit. But frustrating in a good way, in my experience. Really makes those MC-encounters fraught.

Yeah, Ruse occurred to me during the show. But we do talk a fair bit about Wargame: European Escalation, which is the follow-up to Ruse and which takes those concepts a bit further.

I feel like you listened to a different show than the one I was on. I just had to go re-listen to parts of it just to see if I'd missed something, and I still don't see it. I think Bruce raised some great issues that led to fantastic answers from Jake. Sorry you didn't enjoy the episode. I'm pretty happy with it, and with Bruce's contributions.

I'm not going to tell you how you should play your games, but I have to object to your criticism that there's too much die-rolling going on. The approach you describe pretty much rejects in advance any randomness that goes against you, which means you are basically rejecting the entire design of the game and most other games you find in the wargaming and strategy genres. I sympathize, to a point. You can ask Julian about this, since he and I play board games all the time, but I have impressively bad luck with dice. If the probability is 85% that I'll get a hit, I will actually score that hit maybe 60% of the time. When you do everything right and randomness still renders all your maneuvering for naught, it's pretty frustrating. But that's not really what's happening here. Taking a huge risk to get a soldier into position to fire an 85% probability kill-shot doesn't mean your soldier should actually land that shot. XCOM, like a lot of wargames, is about consistently skewing the odds in your favor. Sometimes that's not going to work out, and it will suck, but the whole dynamic of the game is built around the steady accretion of these outcomes. So most of the time, your soldier will score the kill and be perfectly safe. but sometimes, he'll miss and, unless you were able to plan for the possibility he'd miss, you've got to watch him get blown-away at point-blank range. Which is cool! It's why there's suspense!

Couple things here, just from time with the preview build. First, the controls are pretty good but there have been a few times when glitchiness and the snap-to soldier selection have really screwed me and troopers have died because of it. These are huge exceptions to the rule: for the most part they're intuitive and easy. But having just lost my best medic on a normal iron man playthrough because XCOM had just selected another soldier for me without highlighting him, it dampens my enthusiasm for iron man a very little. I might actually suggest playing with iron man and just "house-ruling" iron man back into the game. If you have the discipline to do that, that is, because the game is much better when mistakes and bad luck actually cost you. As for the perspective and ease of reading the map, there are definitely times I've wished for a LOS display. I've had some troopers move to firing positions that turned out to be complete duds, which is kind of frustrating. But again, these cases are rare. Like, it's happened maybe four times in twelve hours and over twenty battles. For the most part, you get a good sense for the flow of the map and where the sight-lines are. To be honest, I think it's clearer than Jagged Alliance 2 in most cases. Cover is crucial but I've come to appreciate the map design and the role of open spaces more. The fact is there are a lot of maps where the gaps between cover positions, the movement ranges of your troopers, and the move-shoot or run choices make for some really good risk-reward judgment calls. Especially once you start seeing more high-powered weapons and explosives flying around, and major features of the battlefield literally start to disintegrate. It's true you won't ever want to be out of cover, but I've faced more situations where XCOM gives me a choice between getting to cover and letting two enemies get a shot off, or staying in the open and trying for a high-percentage kill shot. I haven't played the demo, but from everything I hear, it may not do justice to the game. Be very, very careful about starting on classic or impossible. Normal has a very slow ramp-up and i found it too easy... and then things really got rolling and suddenly veterans were dropping like flies. And classic is savage right from the start.

When I found myself in truly impossible battles, it was often because I didn't farm earlier sectors aggressively enough. Or i just didn't have the brains to jump away when it became clear I could never keep their shields down long enough to cripple them. Although I definitely feel like I've jumped into systems where I just get clobbered and there is no way I could reasonably have been prepared to survive that encounter.

Julian and Rob are wrapping up their vacation when they realize they should probably record a show. An underwhelming board game and their simmering frustration with long campaigns leads to a discussion of what they want from scenario design. They consider the tension between their desire a self-contained, quick-playing scenario and their resentment of puzzles and narrow solutions. Listen

Soren Johnson returns to talk spies, espionage, and covert action with Rob and Julian. They then subject espionage mechanics to forty minutes of interrogation, torture, and unkind words. Then they remember the one game they’ve played that has spies and espionage that they don’t hate. Suspiciously, Rob’s microphone fails midway through the show. Happenstance or sabotage from an enemy agent? Listen

We really need to try this out, but we've been saying that forever around the 3MA watercooler. HistWar was vaporware until a really buggy release, and then I lost track of it completely. But I've heard tell that post-release, it was whipped into shape. I have no idea. We'll investigate. Anyone have hands-on with it? Does it work well?

Bruce, Troy, and Rob discuss the changing landscape of game financing, or at least they try to. The end up discussing Kickstarter almost exclusively, the return of Tom vs. Bruce, and their feelings of optimism about what crowd-funding can mean. Troy douses them with the cold water of reality. They also contemplate the strange meta-game of Kickstarters, and Ian Bogost’s skepticism. Nobody can pronounce OUYA. Listen

Blendo Games' Brendon Chung joins Rob and Julian to talk about Flotilla, Atom Zombie Smasher, Gravity Bone, and his approach to design. Rob and Julian are fascinated by his willingness to conclude a game when it is at its best, and Brendon explains why that is and the things from his own games that he wants to revisit. Rob is crushed to hear of the lost, X-COM style metagame for Atom Zombie Smasher. Listen

Soren Johnson and Cryptic Comet's Vic Davis return to talk with Julian and Rob about artificial intelligence, its limitations, and their changing views on what to do about it. Listen

Ironclad’s Blair Fraser and Stardock’s Chris Bray join Rob, Julian, and freelance writer Kat Bailey to discuss the new Rebellion stand-alone expansion to Sins of a Solar Empire. Kat wants to know what the hell to do about Advent culture. Rob wants to know why Rebellion looks so good. Blair wants everyone to know that the story of SoaSE guides its ongoing direction. Then Blair and Chris tease us with the greatest idea in the history of gaming. Listen: Billy Pilgrim has built a Titan.

Cory Banks joins Julian, Troy, and Rob to talk about fiction and world-building in strategy games. They talk a lot about Endless Space and whether or not its fiction is undercooked, and how it affects the rest of the game. Does having an interesting world make for a better strategy game? Is Civilization just abstracting human history, or is it doing world-building of its own? The gang considers Alpha Centauri, and what its fiction added to the game, and what the poor fiction of Rise of Legends and Kohan took away. Julian explains why Warhammer’s fiction works so brilliantly. Listen Rob’s Endless Space review

I don't think the Titans act as an "I win" button. You pretty much have to build one at some point, but there is a lot of latitude about when and how you bring it out. The Titan has four research stages, at which point you can complete the damn thing. So you are talking about a Tier 4 Military technology, then an expenditure of several thousand credits and resources. Plus whatever supply and training technologies you need to make room for the damn thing. That's a lot of research time and money that goes into bringing out your Titan, and someone else could be improving their regular fleet and economy for the same money. If they use that time well, they could negate any advantage you get by deploying a Titan early. As for faction differences, they have different Titan and tweaked tech trees. Each faction has a half dozen technologies specific to itself. So TEC Loyalist has technologies that confer bonuses for a defensive game style, plus I think some improved diplomacy, while the Rebels get technologies that encourage raiding and using pirates. AI is tough to judge. I play against Hard AI and I usually end up narrowly losing. I've seen it do clever stuff and nothing really terrible. They employ different strategies. They use super weapons effectively. They seem a little passive diplomatically, but just a bit. I was super impressed when it deployed a bunch of level 1 support capital ships behind two higher-level battleships to basically run a Medic-Marine strategy against me. I'd never seen that before, but it won a major battle as the AI healed more damage than my fleet could inflict. Good stuff.

Rod “Slasher” Breslau, eSports correspondent for GameSpot and a panelist on Live on Three, joins Julian and Rob to help them with their recent conversion to the cause of eSports and pro gaming. They discuss the difficulties of getting into the pro gaming scene, how it evolved, and the different forms of success embodied by StarCraft 2 and League of Legends. They also describe why eSports appeal to them, and how it speaks to them as strategy gamers. Listen here.

Tom Chick, SMG Studios designer David Heron, and Jon Shafer join Rob to reflect on their various issues with "fun" and how we relate to games. It's a rambling discussion about what we want from games, how we want to talk about them, and whether enjoyment is possible without fun. Listen to it here.

Not exactly a casual game, but I really like Tropico 4 as a relaxing strategy game. It's got a great banana republic vibe, a decent soundtrack, and really nice looks. Plus, it just isn't all that hard. Or at least, it's not like you'll screw yourself and lose a scenario without ever having a chance. You can almost always fix mistakes, so there's not a ton of pressure, even though some of the missions are challenging.

What I have played is Ahrimen's Gift, and that was strongly favored by my expert Kohan buddies. I need to play Kohan 2 to see whether Tom is right, or whether the Kohan faithful were correct to be skeptical.

If this is trolling, it is very well-done and I applaud you. If not, here's the deal: I went on vacation for a couple weeks and while I was gone, Troy and Bruce stepped up to host great shows and give me a badly-needed break. I was running on fumes, and I felt the show quality had suffered a little bit, and there were a couple topics we had in reserve that I knew I would not be a good fit for. So Bruce did a Bomber Command episode and Troy did Out of the Park. I'm back hosting this week, refreshed thanks to my awesome panelists. The next episode might be delayed a little bit due to some stuff that's going on in our producer's life right now. By the way, Troy created Three Moves Ahead, so it's not like it's weird when he hosts. He did it for years before stepping down to give me my shot, since he was going into PR and now represents a good many strategy games. He's got a different style than I do, and he and I joke about who is the better host, but the truth is the show is in great hands when I'm not around. And even when neither Troy nor I are around. After 170 episodes, we've all gotten pretty good at this.

Jon Shafer joins Rob, Troy, and Julian to talk about challenge in strategy games. What kind of challenges do we want from strategy games, and how does it get botched? Why are people still surprised when AI opponents aren't very clever? Why are they so hesitant to take on multiplayer? What's the difference between good scenario design and unfair scenario design? How amazing is Unity of Command? Seriously, you guys. Download here

PC Gamer staff writer Tom Senior and freelance writer Phill Cameron come to Rob's podcasting island, bringing with them rifles and steam-powered ironclads. Things swiftly turn violent as they discuss Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai, and some of the Total War series' longstanding contradictions. How does balance function in Fall of the Samurai, and how does the campaign structure let down the setting? Why does the AI behave as if it's not sure if it's in a game, or a history sim? How does Fall of the Samurai change the role of gunpowder weapons? Listen here. Rob's Fall of the Samurai Review Phill's review Tom's review

I think one exception to this rule is a question of personal interest. If you really know Civil War-era US politics, Victoria II is going to be a lot more engaging and intuitive than it is for a lot of people. My pal Erik Hanson, who was on our Pride of Nations episode, really got into that game because he actually knows a lot of what's going on in that time period. It gave him a place from which to start figuring out the game. In general, I think the debate between CK2 and EU3 is a good one. I'm with Jon that EU3 is probably easier to learn, but I also think it's easier to be bored while you're figuring out EU3 than it is with CK2. CK2 you've just got more stuff to manage: marriage arrangements, vassal loyalty, plotting, province improvements, etc. Even if you haven't figured it all out, you can more easily track the impact your decisions are having on the game. That is a little harder with EU3, I think, even though it may ultimately be a simpler game.

Hey, just made my account as I begin to move in. Wanted to say hi, and thanks for the warm welcome. I'm really glad there are so many Thumbs listeners who dig what we do over at 3MA. I promise we'll continue to be awesome, and so niche we're almost impossible to understand at times.