Rob Zacny

"A larger scale BF to me" - Yeah, but scale matters after a point. It's the difference between a skirmish and a battle, or a racing game that can support eight cars as opposed to one featuring a field of 32. The added scale changes the experience substantially. I wouldn't underestimate it. I do think Planetside has a ways to go in solving team and faction coordination issues, much as the Battlefield series does. It's sad that multiplayer FPS designers basically have to approach their design expecting that most players will be playing in isolation from one another. But PS2 has some interesting organizational elements that I hope come into their own over time. A commander role, however, seems like a good idea for games like this.

Rob Daviau joins Rob and Julian to talk about components, game enchancements, and theme. How does component quality factor in design decisions, and how much should they support theme? Why do we get so attached to the sensations that accompany a game, to the point where it can profoundly affect the quality of our experience? Why did War of the Ring nearly get Rob Zacny pulled over at the border? Listen

Derek Paxton comes back to the show to talk with Tom, Rob, Bruce, and Troy about Fallen Enchantress, his massive revision of 2010's Elemental: War of Magic. He explains how he started reshaping Elemental, and how the project grew along the way. Tom is already a big fan, and even suggests that Fallen Enchantress may be close to Master of Magic-levels of greatness. Rob and Troy are a bit more reserved, and some arguments break out over diplomacy, the early game, and the tactical combat. Derek details his thinking on each of those points, and goes a long way to explaining why Fallen Enchantress works the way it does. Listen

That, my friend, is a picture of Krieg Spiel. The original wargame. I don't know how heavily adapted it is from its origins as a Prussian General Staff exercise in the 19th century, but it remains fairly serious. Thinly disguised homework. But I haven't played it, and i kind of want to.

In a perhaps dangerously detailed discussion of League of Legends, Rob and Julian talk to Rhea "Ashelia" Monique and Julian Williams about the recent League of Legends championship. They talk about the new ways pro teams are playing the game, and the connection between the pro game and the regular ranked play. They also talk about the importance of casual play and bringing in new players, and discuss the different ways StarCraft 2 and League of Legends approach that issue.

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.