spacerumsfeld

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Posts posted by spacerumsfeld

  2. Posted

    Enjoyed the episode.  Any chance of some reference links to the books on the Falklands conflict that Mitch and Bruce were discussing?

    Sure!  Mitch passed along this list:

     

    100 Days - Sandy Woodward 
     
    Amphibious Assault Falklands Michael Clapp 
     
    3 Command Brigade in the Falklands No Picnic - Julian Thompson 
     
    Falklands War - Martin Middlebrook
     
    Argentine Fight for the Falklands - Martin Middlebrook
     
    Battle for the Falklands - Max Hastings 
     
    Thanks, Mitch!

  7. Posted

    I'd be up for the Brutal Legend show.

    Correct. Endless Legend won the poll during the week in which every person remotely related to strategy gaming was playing Stellaris for review. Since then, it's been a royal pain getting people on board with going back to spend time with an old game with so many new releases coming out. For a fun peek behind the scenes: scheduling shows and coordinating everyone's schedule is the most difficult part of doing this show, by a wide margin.

    Endless Legend should be coming very soon, and our next Patreon poll will be up today.

  8. Posted

    Hey, can we talk more about conception of aliens in sci-fi? Because that's fascinating. The score argument thing has been done to death. Let's just all agree that the sooner Tom is taken to the International Criminal Court at The Hague to pay for his crimes, the better.

    The example of the planet in Solaris is a great one: in most SF 4x games this would be treated like a one-time event, and you'd send a science ship, and you'd spend some time and eventually get +15% research and you'd either colonize the planet or not and that would be that. Are there any games where the planet itself could be a major game point that lasted longer than the time it took to read the event log? I haven't played a lot of Stellaris, but this is what I feel it really missed: the ability to actually make events an organic part of the gameplay, rather than something you just read and discarded. There would have to be some way to interact with the planet over the course of the game, and for small changes to be meaningful. In Stellaris, your scientists would all go insane. But Stellaris doesn't make you care about your leaders, and there is no way to make them do things other than just be attached to ships.

    Of course, there are a whole bunch of problems - most players would want to just nuke the planet or something.

    I'd love to hear about some game that goes more in the Solaris direction.

  9. Posted

    Were elements of games such as Rome 2, CoH2 and Stellaris disappointing? Sure. Are they three examples of the worst games ever made? No. And to tell people they are is simply dishonest.

    Do you think it is equally dishonest to tell people that he is pronouncing them three of the worst games ever made? Because he is not.

  10. Posted

    My point is that the score is way lower than the review when judged on the scoring scale of the site it was written for. 

     

    From IGN's own score description page:

     

    7.0-7.9 - GOOD

    Playing a Good game is time well spent. Could it be better? Absolutely. Maybe it lacks ambition, is too repetitive, has a few technical bumps in the road, or is too repetitive, but we came away from it happy nonetheless. We think you will, too.

    6.0-6.9 - OKAY

    These recommendations come with a boatload of “ifs.” There’s a good game in here somewhere, but in order to find it you’ll have to know where to look, and perhaps turn a blind eye to some significant drawbacks.

    5.0-5.9 - MEDIOCRE

    This is the kind of bland, unremarkable game we’ve mostly forgotten about a day after we finish playing. A mediocre game isn’t something you should spend your time or money on if you consider either to be precious, but they’ll pass the time if you have nothing better to do.

     

     

    Reading Rowan's review, it seems like he did indeed find the game "Okay." Which is somewhere in the 6-range. Sounds appropriate to me.

  11. Posted

    However, when a reviewer is writing for an outlet, they should have some awareness of the scoring system they are being asked to employ. It's all very well for you to say "well if only IGN didn't use this, etc..." but the reality is that they do use it and he knew this before submitting the review. This was not rowankaiser.com it is IGN and if he knowingly gives a score using their scale that is practically the lowest for a strategy game for several years

     

    One problem with this approach is that unless the Stellaris reviewer is the same person who reviewed the other games, fitting his or her score into the site's ratings for those other games will be impossible, simply because he or she might rate the games differently relative to one another.  For what it's worth, in all the years of reviewing games for websites and magazines, I never once checked to see what rating someone else had given a game for the purposes of deciding my own score.  The only considerations were my opinion and the rating scale I was given.  Not the ratings scale I perceived to be in use.  If a website said that 5.0 was an "average" game (and at one time, most of the major sites did) then an average game got a 5.0 from me.  It was then the editor's job to take the review and make sure that the text matched the score assigned, and that the score matched the website's scale.  I once had a game score significantly lowered because the editor felt that the text did not support the score as laid out by the magazine's scoring system.  And editorial control is important: if the editor feels that the score does not match the site's/magazine's scale, then a discussion should (and often does) take place between the editor and writer. I have had scores tweaked up or down (with my approval) and have also rewritten reviews to match what I felt was an appropriate score (with editorial approval).

     

    Another problem is that the sites themselves aren't quite sure what their ratings systems mean.  In the early-ish days of Gamespot, I went back and forth many times with editors about whether a marginally above-average game on their scale was 5.5, 6.0, or 6.5.  7.0 was supposed to be "good."  But even then, the 1-10 scale seemed to be unsuited to the purpose.  I noticed in one comment on Rowan's review that the writer considered 6.3 absurdly low because it was just 0.3 away from 6.0, which was a score that should be reserved only for horrible broken, unplayable games.  Which immediately made me wonder what 1.0 to 5.9 was for.

     

    Scores are stupid. Pretend they don't exist and read reviews for the text and not the number attached to them. If you disagree with any of Rowan's actual complaints, that would make for a lot better discussion than you comparing the arbitrary dumb number he assigned to the arbitrary dumb numbers assigned by IGN's other reviewers.

     

    Scores can be very useful screening tools when you are looking for a few games to choose between in a genre, for example, and don't want to read 10 or 20 different game reviews.  The problem is that with all the pre-release streaming and gameplay information, scores have become more about validating people's opinions than actual purchasing guides. At least it seems that way to me based on how many people complain about scores while announcing that they haven't purchased the game yet but fully planned to do so and would be back shortly to really show up the reviewer.

     

    Well, I don't think Rowan Kaiser is a particularly nice person, so if he's taking heat over the internet then that's fine by me.  Just karma doing its job.

     
    I have never met Rowan Kaiser, but I would personally never justify criticism of his work based on my dislike of his person.  And it seems rather poor form to even bring it up. Although I am pretty old-fashioned.

  14. Posted

    The base game gets updated and patched with every expansion, so many of the new mechanics that came online with each expansion are in the vanilla game.

     

    That's the one unfortunate thing about Steam.  I'd love to be able to choose which patch version of a game I use.

     

    Ah, for the days of patches-scrolls.de!

  15. Posted

    I don't expect it to teach me every nuance of the strategic model -- half the fun of a strategy game is figuring out those on your own. What would be nice, though, was if I had some sense after playing the tutorial of what sorts of things would make for a good move on the first round. I have to start by placing alignment points, for instance -- what are the pros and cons of dumping them all into a couple of countries versus spreading them around? What are some good early cards I should be keeping an eye out for, and why are they significant? What are some "tells" I can use to spot when my opponent is building towards a big move in one region?

    After finishing the tutorial I tried a game, and immediately ran into the fact that I had no idea what to do first because all I'd picked up were questions like these. I know you can learn this stuff the hard way by losing a lot, and for some people that may even be fun (the popularity of Dwarf Fortress is testament enough to that). But for me, feeling dumb is not fun. Constantly losing games because I don't know what I'm doing is not fun.

    (It could be I'm just stupid, though. I am completely open to that possibility.)

     

    I certainly doubt that you're in any way stupid, but I think this simply speaks to the difference between people who grew up with digital games in a certain space, and those who grew up with boardgames.  For me, learning a boardgame is just learning all the ways to lose, until you eventually don't.  I find it much more satisfying to figure out why something isn't working than to have someone tell me.  And against the AI, I can lose over and over and not worry about it.  Although I've played the game enough in the boardgame iteration that I'm not coming at it from a newbie perspective.

     

    You should definitely check out Twilightstrategy.com, which was mentioned upthread.  That has all the hints and tips you could ever want.

  16. Posted

    Re: How friendly the digital version is to someone new to the game -- I think it's good but not great. As a listener to 3ma from the beginning, I'd heard of game but had never actually seen it. I started by reading the rule book and playing the tutorial. That gave me a good idea of the mechanics of the game, but no clue as to why I'd choose one action or another. After badly losing a couple of games I went looking for some general information on the game and found out about Twilight Strategy. After reading that and playing a few more games, I feel that I've got a pretty decent handle on the game now and have managed to beat the AI a few times.

     

    Although I have to ask why you expect a game to teach you strategy in addition to the rules.  Good on ya, as they say, for reading the rulebook.  That's the best way to learn the game, in my opinion, since then you can tell if the game isn't applying the rules correctly.  But back to the question of how friendly the game is to new players, I think the playing field is tilted here for people used to digital games, who have no problem with the intricacies of Europa Universalis but aren't necessarily open to playing a game like Twilight Struggle over and over until they figure the strategies out themselves.  Or has the expectation of strategy guides/hints become the norm for all games?

     

    The biggest frustration after the initial 'I have no idea what to do' phase has been the accidental DEFCON suicide. That's mostly on me for not thinking through all the possible ways that an event could be used by the other side, but it'd be nice if the game would throw up some kind of warning in such a case. Example: played Lone Gunman as my last action of the current round, figuring that letting USSR see my cards at that point would do the least possible damage. USSR used his 1 op point operation from the card to perform a meaningless coup of a battleground country in Central America, thus lowering DEFCON and costing me the game.

     

    But no better way to learn than to have those permutations happen to you, no?  Or no?

     

     

    Enjoying the episode, but man, those are some basic rules for two of you to misunderstand after all these years! What in the world.

     

    +1.  I think this is a result of people not reading the rules and just learning from someone who taught them, or reading the rules wrong once and never being corrected.  When our group learns a new game, usually multiple people read the rules and correct each other when we do things wrong.  It helps to enjoy reading rules!

     

    I haven't gotten the digital edition yet, but I've recommended twice so far to people interested in the game and inexperienced playing it. I don't think I'd even try to pitch it to people who hadn't heard of it. Agree there is a vocabulary deficiency in digital games. I suppose Twilight Struggle is a "turn-based strategy game," but that term does not describe it.

     

    I think this demonstrates how narrow the digital strategy spectrum is.  I mean, this isn't a new problem - boardgame ports have been available for a long time.  What would you call digital Puerto Rico? There is an aversion to too much abstraction in digital games that I think prevents abstract mechanics from entering the vocabulary.  It's back to the old question: why abstract something on the computer when you don't have to?

  21. Posted

    Hello Ludwig von Mises!

     

    Thanks for the great feedback.  I'm only going to disagree strenuously on one point: Programmed Instruction is only meant to teach you the game, not to codify a set of rules for those scenarios.  Once you learn the rules, Guards Counterattack is meant to be played with all the rules, not just the initial rules presented via PI.  Furthermore, Programmed Instruction doesn't just turn off this rule or that rule at random - the scenarios require a certain subset of the rules that build upon each other, which is a long way from the disconnection of pretty much any rule system you want.  If computer wargames did this kind of rules teaching, I'd be very receptive to it - but computer wargames can't even be bothered to have proper tutorials (and I include Decisive Battles in this as watching a separate video is not a tutorial).

     

    As for the other two points, I'd have to go back and listen to the podcast again but you may be correct that you understand the game better than I do at this point.  I think we're probably on the same page regarding our overall impression of the game, which seems to be that we both like it.  Now if we can just get them to fix the UI.

     

    -Bruce

  22. Posted

    Very few boardgame reviews are based on lots of plays and vast experience because unlike a video game you can't just sit down and play it for 20 hours at your leasure. I think the panel being relatively inexperienced with the game is fine, most of their impressions were well grounded. Even the idea that certain elements of the game might solve out with repeat play is an obvious conclusion to draw given the nature of the road map and the way the combat works. In reality it doesn't quite pan out like that

    Few things in boardgaming bother me more than people professing in-depth insight into a game after two playings.

  25. Posted

    I really enjoyed this episode.  I think this phenomenon of enjoying things you're "good at" even extends to things like boardgames:  I feel that my experience of U.S. Civil War (new game by Mark Simonitch) was improved by the fact that I won my first game, because it felt like a game that I could "understand" rather than something that defeated me the first time and that I might never master.

     

    As far as The Witness goes, I felt like the underlying issue was the panel's unstated unease with the idea of games as "worthwhile" pursuits.  It felt like even when you were trying to downplay the idea of "learning skills" from games, you were assuming the existence of some sort of "ideal" game pursuit, such as one that taught you organic chemistry. (And while Danielle brought it up in the context of medicine, as a physician, I'm not sure what benefit I would get from a game that taught organic chemistry :) )  I recall Erik Wolpaw's comment that Tom mentioned recently on one of his podcasts, that when the apocalypse comes, the thing that shooting people in video games will have taught us is how to shoot people in video games.  I'm just waiting for the day that people are comfortable saying, "I enjoyed playing this game, and that's all the justification I need."