Rob Zacny

Popcap’s Jeff Green joins returning guest David Heron, Troy, and Rob for a discussion of the Civilization V expansion Gods and Kings. Together, they discuss why Civ V was so controversial, how G&K changes it, and whether its major changes seem quite as meaningful now that they’ve put some time into it. Be sure to listen to the episode for details on a little contest to give away some spare Sins: Rebellion keys. Which we should have done last week, but we forgot. Because we’re disgraceful. But still pretty great. Listen

Rowan Kaiser rejoins Rob and Bruce to talk about War in the East, while Bruce has been busy with the Don to the Danube expansion. Rowan has thoughts about approaching the hardest of the hardcore wargames from a newcomer's perspective, while Rob is laboring under the most epic misconception in 3MA history. Bruce is a little bit disappointed in the new scenarios, and he and Rob discuss their ideal Eastern front scenarios. Then the panel talk about Matrix prices, and what they mean for the genre. Listen Bruce's War in the East writings Rowan on War in the East

Michael Hermes joins Rob, Troy, and Julian to talk about FTL. Why FTL understands why we like space, its lovely simplicity, and why unfairness is cool. Read Troy on FTL, then read Rob on his rendezvous with death. Listen here

Rob is joined by Shawn Andrich, Evan Lahti, and Phill Cameron to talk about Planetside 2 and the past and future of the large-scale shooter. At what point does the scale start to turn a shooter into a strategy game, and does Planetside hit that level? Everyone suspects that Planetside would be more strategic if only there were a commander role, and Rob and Shawn are reminded of the old Battlezone games. Evan is impressed by how diverse the experiences and battlefields are in Planetside 2, but everyone has doubts about the F2P economy and the progression system. The group also talk about the ArmA series and Natural Selection 2's blend of RTS and FPS. Listen:

Shadow of the Horned Rat is a game I badly wanted to play when it came out, but was just out of my hardware range and I never got to try it. If anyone knows where to find it today... Riadsala, I don't think your list entirely gets at what's gone on at Relic the last ten years, though. CoH got two expansions, one of which has a reputation for being kind of underwhelming. Dawn of War got two major expansions. Then Dawn of War 2, then Chaos Rising which was almost a game in itself. Then Retribution, which is this DoW 2 omnibus. I think the feeling that Warhammer shoved Relic's other projects aside has some basis in reality. Also, where Homefront at? But I don't have that anxiety about Total War. Truth is, I think Total War has become a gaming name on par with Warhammer. Romans and redcoats and knights are more instantly relatable than Skaven. Also, Total War's core eras could use a break.

Arkham Asylum always felt consistent with The Animated Series to me: smart, fairly restrained in its treatment of female characters (except for Ivy, but that's kind of the point of that character), and stylish. With Arkham City, it just seemed like most of that way. Female characters were about as sexy as a strip club located off the interstate outside of town, and the way the story was broken up into these vignettes made it actually feel much smaller than Arkham Asylum. Arkham Asylum was this huge, detailed location. Arkham City was, well, a fake city. A studio backlot. Only the museum really stands out as a fleshed-out setting.

"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.