sclpls

After listening to this episode I'm intrigued by A.I. Wars, but when I look at the website, I'm still not sold. Anyone care to evangelize on the topic?

I'm a little surprised Thumbs are so down on Tim & Eric...

That XCOM post is interesting because it does sort of point to what the problem with the free-to-play model is from the perspective of strategy game design. A game developer trying to design a strategy game is trying to balance various risk/reward decisions to make an interesting game to play. In a free-to-play model, you basically throw that balance out the window by allowing the player to buy his/her way into success. Congratulations! You've broken your game! I don't have a lot to say about the ethics of a business model. I think everyone really ought to be skeptical of a business model that tries to skirt a rather simple transaction of purchasing a product for a fixed amount of money. Alternatives to that generally involve trying to hide costs & fees, which makes it more difficult to determine if consumers are getting their money's worth.

This reminds me of that Soren Johnson talk about how lots of games have this weird disconnect about what they purport to be, and what they actually are. Like Bioshock is supposedly about the failures of an attempt to put a Randian libertarian utopia into existence, and it evokes this idea through narrative and atmosphere, but the action is just straight up shooting dudes (now that I think about it, a game that was about a person or group of people coping within a failing utopian society would be pretty cool...). That doesn't necessarily detract from the enjoyment of the game, or what a person gets out of the game, but as an aesthetic achievement of a particular vision it does leave a lingering question asking us just how thoroughly that vision was actually achieved?

Oh yeah, Sightglass is pretty amazing. Most coffee places in SF I prefer their espresso though. The exception is Blue Bottle, where I'm pretty into their drip coffee (although I find the quality varies kind of radically from location to location...)

I wonder if people that were put off by Dr. Bruce Geryk's comments are fairly new to 3MA? I only ask because I think Bruce is something of an aquired taste. I didn't care for his contributions when I first started listening, I tended to find he would obsess over weird details, and sort of derail conversations. Over time though, I began to find him more insightful than I originally gave him credit for. Worth considering.

I'm not going to get into the weeds of what Kordanor posted, but I will just note that pre-PC patch I noticed a fair amount of visibility and weird cover bonus issues he described above, but, with a single exception I can think of, haven't seen them post-patch. Some of the issues described (what direction the aliens are looking/how much someone moves around while under cover) strike me as a disagreement about how much agency a player should have in a game. Luckily for people that weren't too into the changes Jake Solomon made to the game it seems like Xenonauts will end up being the type of X-COM-type game they are looking for.

I so agree with the critique of the economy. It seems like you should be able to see what sort of alien tech/corpses you have available in the engineering screen, but instead you have to wander over to the gray market area. Totally inelegant. However I had the opposite reaction to everyone's feeling re: inventory and leveling soldiers up. Where Troy & co. found the inventory not an obvious choice to make, I did. And where they found they stuck to the same choices for leveling up, I didn't. There are a few choices that I always go with (always give the support squad members the ability to use medkits three times), but for the most part I find it provides interesting ways to develop specialization within the squad. For example, a squad member with lots of defense bonuses is better suited for scouting out ahead, whereas one with lots of critical hit bonuses better for taking down high HP enemies.

re: expert gamers - although it doesn't fit quite within the parameters you described, a lot of those topics were discussed on the e-sports episode. As someone that is really not interested in the whole e-sports phenomenon, and kind of turned off by it, I found it really interesting to hear how other people experience and relate to games on this level of competition/mastery.

Also while I am on the topic of SF-related stuff I will also mention Universal Cafe as a totally amazing brunch spot.

FYI, the taqueria they mentioned in the Mission that has board game nights is Taqueria San Jose (their al pastor is not bad!) I did not know about this board game night, so thanks for mentioning it on the podcast... I am inclined to check it out now. It is so funny because I've spent a number of Friday nights after work drinking at Rosamunde perfectly oblivious to all the awesome boardgaming happening basically next door. Damn I love SF.

Really digging Le Havre. Also, against my better judgment I picked up the iOS version of CivRev. It's not terrible for what it is, but the UI still feels annoying on a phone. Would be improved on an iPad I guess, but probably not too much. I can't wait for the iOS release of Eclipse!

I really love how the Joe Biden character in the Onion has developed. I don't know why Sean likes Biden, but the Joe Biden character in the Onion basically makes him the most awesome politician of all time in my mind.

re: the boardgame-like quality of FTL - in addition to Battlestations, which Archinerd mentioned, the game designers cite Space Alert as an influence, and that will be pretty clear to anyone familiar with both games. Space Alert is also totally sweet for incorporating a lot of video game concepts into it's design: it's a real time cooperative game (totally great to play if you have friends with a serious analysis paralysis problem), and it also introduces game concepts and difficulty gradually rather than all at once. Both Space Alert and FTL deal with randomized enemies, and having a crew manage weapons, shields, power levels of the ship, etc. Where FTL differs from Space Alert is that it stretches out the whole concept into a campaign.

I really enjoyed how the conversation drifted to screwing up rules playing board games, and competitiveness in board games. Best wishes to Rob Daviau's new endeavors! He has always been insightful on 3MA, and I am interested in seeing what his game designs look like now that he is free from the shackles of his mainstream corporate overlords.

Part of the pleasure of 3MA is most of the games talked about will be things I've never heard of before. I will add Sins of a Solar Empire, and Risk Legacy.

I think it was Troy, who really nailed it when he said that the real advantage to kickstarter is it's a great way for people to sort of test the waters and see how much interest there is in a project. And as Bruce said, it is a way for a company to shift and mitigate some risks, which is really important for smaller developers. So while Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing models almost definitely won't upend the role of traditional publishers, some cool projects will definitely get made that otherwise wouldn't necessarily get made, and I think that's pretty sweet.

looks like I spoke too soon, Endless Space actually totally has a feature where certain cards cancel each other out. Nice!

Having finally played Endless Space I can now totally see the criticism that Rob & others had about the lack of flavor. I think the flavor text in the game is good, but it definitely doesn't do a whole lot to try and bring the player into its universe. On the other hand, I'm loving the board game-like elegance of the clean interface and rules. Some people dislike the card system in the battles, but I loved it. An improvement might be if the cards worked a little more like a game like Popular Front, where playing the right card against your opponent nullifies their card, etc. At any rate, I like that it adds an element of unpredictability to combat whereas in so many 4X games combat tends to boil down to fairly simple mathematical calculations.

I was a huge TA fan, and love the concept of planet to planet battles, so I'd love to back this, but I'm reluctant to do so without getting a ballpark idea of what kind of system specs they think this would require.

I'd like to see a 4X or grand strategy type game where government was more than just a particular set of bonuses. Where the type of government you had would have an impact on the type of actions you could take, or create different procedures affecting how you play the game. It's a tall order because if you created too much detail I think it would make the game really dull, but it would be nice to see a game that illuminates how different types of public institutions result in different policy outcomes.

You basically have this right. You can turn notifications on or off. But it's notifications for everything so if you turn off notifications you don't get the achievement popups, but also no notifications if people message you, or if someone appears online. I think it's a real bummer that you can't select what sort of popup messages you'd like to receive because I'd like to know if someone sent me a message, but find the constant pop ups letting me know that so-and-so is online to be totally annoying and tedious.

Great episode. I feel like a retooling of the Twilight Struggle mechanics could potentially be quite effective for a spy or espionage game. The competition for zones of influence seems like the right idea for what an intelligence agency is trying to accomplish. As to how a spy mechanic might be better suited for a 4X game? I'm also not sure it could work. But if a 4X game has to have spies, I think I would prefer something that just makes diplomacy more interesting, like you could use spies to learn about various trade or military agreements, etc. I agree with the panel that espionage and counter-espionage tends to feel pretty tedious.

I thought this was a frustrating episode to listen to for a number of reasons. Perhaps the fundamental reason is I felt the whole idea of world building was never clearly defined. It was distinguished from back story, it was decided that flavor text had something to do with it, but it was never really established what was at issue here. There were a lot of potentially interesting questions that were sort of danced around instead of being addressed head on. We understand that world building is valuable because it gets players invested in the game, but we never understand how that happens. We almost get to the heart of the issue when the discussion turns to fanboyism - and how if you like something, it's easier to get invested in the game's mythology and... world building I guess? But just when you think the discussion will delve deeper into the question of how and why that process happens we shift gears to something else. Maybe that's just as well. I think, if we're being honest, why our preferences are what they are will always end up being something of a mystery, but I can't help but feel like a pretty fundamental question was ignored. A possible thesis haunts my mind as I listen to this episode: world building, and our attachment to that process is merely a result of the passage of time. Thus games like Master of Orion, Alpha Centauri, Warhammer 40k, Starcraft, games based on older IP like Dune, etc. have an unfair advantage over a game like Endless Space. We've spent more time with those games, and they have had more time to develop and unfold in our brains. They form a legacy that leaves an impression on us, and as such their worlds seem richer compared to a brand new IP... one that doesn't have the advantage of expansions, novelizations, the memory of that one crazy game we played against our friends, and the simple joy of nostalgia. I'd like to think that what counts as good world building isn't this simple bias towards the older experiences we've had, but there isn't anything in this episode that suggests otherwise. So I'd like to give a shout out to Cory for offering what I saw as a much needed counter-point in this discussion. Like Troy, I haven't played Endless Space, so I'll reserve judgment about the merits or demerits of the game, but also as a neutral observer, some of the critiques of the game sounded like they were coming from a slightly unfair place (on the other hand, I think the conclusion of that source of criticism is nonetheless correct... who wouldn't want to see the 4X space genre step up its game???). On that note: I'd like to see a podcast talk about the game Eclipse: good God is that some satisfying 4X space action with elegant board game mechanics.

This episode was wonderful. I hope Bruce can do an episode on Andean Abyss (which should be shipping soon!) since I know he has mentioned on previous episodes that it's a board game he has been excited about.