Rob Zacny

Did you stick with EU3 through all its expansions? I feel like some of these improvements, like army management, showed up by the end. But they are more effective AI allies now. And the retreat mechanic really made wars feel less like a game of whack a mole. Siege is much clearer now too, you're right That's nice to be able to see what controls the progress of a siege.

You know, Paradox play around a bit with the lag-time between decisions and execution. Diplomats and merchants take longer to get where they are going depending on how far it is, but by and large everything happens instantly with a button press. And I think that's almost how it has to be. Time-dilation in sci-fi can be really interesting, as anyone who read The Forever War can attest, but in a game, it couldn't just be another detail layered into the design. The game would pretty much HAVE to be about the passage of time, I think. Ditto EU IV can't really model the delay in information reaching the capital without shattering the simplicity they've worked really hard to attain. But I WOULD love to see a game that, right from the start, was about the difficulty of managing sprawling empires against the constraints of communications and travel technology. Again, I'd refer back to the show we did on A Few Acres of Snow, which the is about the French and Indian War but which the designer admitted was envisioned more as being about interstellar conflict. That game is entirely about anticipation and lag between intent and effect. And it's one of my favorites.

Rob, Troy, Fraser Brown, and Rowan Kaiser talk about the latest Civilization expansion. Listen

Tom Chick joins Rob and Troy to talk about campaigns in RTS games, particularly StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. Listen

Bruce and Tom join Rob for a late-night chat about Wargame: AirLand Battle, Cold War tactics and politics, and Rob's overwhelming awfulness at this game. Listen

Evan Lahti joins Rob to talk about Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm (a totally LEGIT strategy topic). They discuss why it outstrips Heroes of Stalingrad, how it does faction design right, and the role of asymmetry. Listen

Relic's Quinn Duffy and former Relic producer and friend of the show Shane Neville join Rob to talk about Company of Heroes past and future. Listen

Rob talks to the Paradox brain trust of CEO Fred Wester and VP Shams Jorjani to discuss publishing, Paradox's approach to the business, and whether reviewers are the enemy. Listen

3MA Producer Michael Hermes and GWJ editor Erik Hanson joins Rob and Tom to talk about Victoria II: Heart of Darkness. Rob is reconsidering some of his earlier, harsher views on Victoria while Tom argues that it is a towering achievement of game design that speaks to real-world politics in a way few others have ever attempted. Listen

So I think we have a tendency to elide thoughts when it comes to Civ because we talk it so much on the cast. But I should have been clear: Civ's management of settlements is way, way more involved and varied than what you find in a lot of space 4Xs because the geography is more varied. And that's become even more true since natural resources became a part of the series. If you really want to wring every last efficiency from your empire in Civ, you really have to start hand-placing a lot of the improvements and workers. And you're rewarded for that. If you really know how to develop a frontier mountain city for both border defense and military production, you've got to fight a lot of pushback from growth penalties and a lack of arable land. Even my ideal city location (a on a river emptying into an ocean bay surrounded by flatland, then a ring of hills) is probably going to be stronger if you specialize it and train it in a certain direction. By comparison, I think the majority of space 4X games have much thinner colonization and development mechanics that leaves things feeling "samey" much faster. That's not to say every game should be doing what Civ does. But I think it's a problem when a game forces you to continually engage with a task that is too simplistic. So Sword of the Stars 2 was my first SotS game and... well, you know. If you say it's worth checking out, though, I'll take a look.

Tom Chick and Rob talk about the rise of early access programs, whether it's a good thing, and what it means for their work. Listen

Damn right they are.

At one point I said devs seemed to be really literal when it came to this genre. And what I mean is that they create the sense of a huge universe by... creating a huge universe with tons of nodes for activity. Spaceships are cool, so they give you the tools to build a bunch of them and then create giant fleets of them. It's scale as design. It's easy, and MOO kind of set the stage for it, but scale is really tricky to use well in strategy and wargaming. If you don't get more interesting decisions, just more of them, then you're making a worse game, I think. It's an interesting idea. I was more negative initially, but then I realized I was being literal and thinking more along the lines of how other 4Xs do it, which we've already established i don't care for. I think where it gets hard is making those two angles of play equally satisfying. You're kind of designing two different games that eventually connect and then overlap. I don't know how you'd make that work, but the fact I don't know intrigues me.

I think there's a bit of context there. We kinda talked about how WH40K is really dumb and derivative, but it has done that with such gusto and investment that we kinda, sorta care now. And really, the Tau aren't Space Japanese. At least not in the fiction I've read. We had more thoughts on why 40K works as well as it does back in episode 176.

Andrew Groen and Sean Sands join Rob to discuss how Heart of the Swarm has changed StarCraft 2, and the evolving competitive landscape. (Cover image: Enrique Espinoza courtesy MLG) Listen

Troy, Julian, Dave Heron, and Rob talk about the role of extraordinary disruptions in strategy games. From acts of God to the acts of Khan, why don't more strategy games include disruptions? And should they? Listen

Bruce, Troy, and Rob discuss Take Command: 2nd Manassas and why it is one of the best tactical Civil War games ever made. Along the way they discuss what they want from wargames, mission structure, and how few games really address the real challenges of battlefield command. The group lapse into a Tim Stone-induced reverie as they discuss games that have dealt with command and control from the perspective of a Napoleon or Lee. Apologies for sound quality issues: Rob’s microphone was having a disastrous day. Listen Tim Stone on Waterloo

Chris and Rowan Kaiser join Rob to dissect SimCity and its many quirks. Listen

Awesome Out of Ten's Fraser Brown and PC Gamer's T.J. Hafer join Rob to talk about Paradox's March of the Eagles. Listen

It's just Troy and Rob this week as they reflect on Cold War strategy games and the unique challenges and temptations of that setting. Listen

2x2's Tomislav Uzelac joins Bruce and Rob to talk about designing Unity of Command, scenario design versus systems design, and where the series goes from here. Listen

Jon Shafer joins Rob and Troy to talk about his new project, At the Gates, and the role of map evolution. Listen

It's old home week on Three Moves Ahead as the full panel assembles to talk about their favorite games and trends of 2012, and Tom Chick crashes the party to bury the hexagon, not to praise it. Listen

Gas Powered Games' Chris Taylor joins Rob, Troy, and Julian to talk about Total Annihilation and the Supreme Commander series, as well the problems currently facing Gas Powered and their Wildman Kickstarter. Listen

We also didn't talk about Dungeon Siege. Our interest in Taylor's work was pretty specific with this episode. Taylor admits it's their weakest game, but not sure why it would come up here. Also, come on, Taylor and GPG have a pretty solid batting average.