hexgrid

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  1. Episode 343: XCOM 2

    All of this is more than justifying my "don't buy a Firaxis game until it's had a year to mature" policy.
  2. On the subject of the traitor mechanic, Dune's was slightly different from what Julian remembers, but he has the essence of it: There are leader tokens in Dune that come into play in combat. Each side has a set of leaders (I think 5, but it has been a while, it could be 6), and those leaders have a combat value printed on them. When you enter a fight, you commit a leader, some number of points of spice (the game's currency) and some number of available troops, and the sum of those is your combat value. Highest wins, and you and your opponent assemble your hand in secret. There are some twists that make this more interesting, but for the purposes of the traitor mechanic, that's all you need to understand. At the beginning of the game, the leaders all go in the lid of the box, face down and mixed up. Everyone chooses 5 (I think? Enough that all the leaders are chosen) without showing anyone else. Each player chooses one leader from the set they pulled from the box and writes its name down as their traitor. Then all the leaders go back in the box lid, and everyone grabs their team's leaders, and play starts. In combat, if you meet the leader you have as your traitor, you win, even if you should have lost badly. The traitor is a trump card. The important thing about the Harkonnen player is that while all the other players get one traitor, the Harkonnen player has every leader they picked up in the traitor raffle as a traitor. Because of the way the raffle operates, the only leaders of yours you can be sure aren't traitors are the ones you picked yourself during the raffle; those are safe. Any others are potentially compromised. Because of the way the math works, the Harkonnen player has as many traitors as everyone else combined, so you need to be particularly careful who you field against them. Julian was mostly on the money, but everyone gets a traitor, and the Harkonnen get a legion of them. Did I mention that there were combat cards ("treachery cards") you can include in battles that are used to assassinate leaders? That the Harkonnen player gets to look at each treachery card and auction it off without showing anyone what they're buying, but the Emperor player gets the money? The Bene Geserit player can tell another player they face in combat to do something ("Don't defend your leader from poison.") and the Atreides player can ask a question ("Are you using a lasgun?") in combat. Dune is such a good game, and it's quite assymetrical without being too badly tilted in any direction. It should get the 3MA treatment at some point, if you can pull together six people to play full games. Apparently Twilight Imperium Rex: Final Days of an Empire is Dune without the Dune IP, and given what a good game it is, it's worth a go. I've picked it up, but the box is still shrinkwrapped and awaiting a slice of my Copious Spare Timetm.
  3. Episode 342: Satellite Reign

    I don't know that you can nail it down that firmly. Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Machinist stories were written as part of the cyberpunk movement, and they are far more concerned with transhumanism in a distant enough future that interstellar space flight and alien contact are commonplace. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", which strongly influenced the cyberpunk movement but predated it, was set in a similarly distant future where . Consider 'Mirrorshades', the anthology of short stories that built the movement on the firm foundations laid by Neuromancer and Burning Chrome. Several of the stories are pure near-future dystopian sci-fi, but others aren't; 400 Boys, for instance (which is kind of A Clockwork Orange with psychers in an allegorical deep future domed city). Mozart in Mirrorshades is about corporations using time portals to colonize the past to steal resources from their own history. Tales of Houdini is more about attitude than setting, and can actually be seen as a very precient (if futile) shot across the bows of Reality TV. The Gernsback Continuum is set in the present and is all about past ideas of the future that never happened. Post/transhumanism was one of the pillars of the cyberpunk movement, and I think Transistor qualifies on that front. Brigandage occurring under the shiny veneer of a collapsing social order (by individuals, corporations, governments, crime syndicates and so on) is another pillar. The movement never acted constrained by its pillars, however. A lot of cyberpunk was set in the near future because it helped explore the themes the movement was interested in, but it's also largely because the movement was a reaction to the sterile austerity of 70s deep-future science fiction. A lot of cyberpunk can be seen as a humanist response to the lack of deep characters in 70s sf; the Asimov/Clarke/Niven tradition of characters as thinly veiled exposition devices. I see no problem with calling Transistor "Cyberpunk".
  4. Episode 342: Satellite Reign

    It's been a while, but IIRC if you imagine Syndicate Wars with a fixed camera and EGA graphics, you've got the experience in a nutshell.
  5. Episode 342: Satellite Reign

    I always felt that the best cyberpunk was an attempt to set a caper flick in a corporate dystopian near future. Strip away the corporate death squads and the technosorcery and it's basically the original 1969 "The Italian Job". Competence porn. Watching a team of skilled people pull off a plan in the face of the unexpected. It's not a shock that the decade that gave us cyberpunk also gave us "The A Team". In that sense, I always found Syndicate a little ham-handed. It was big on transgression, but far less so on logic. You somehow took over the world (assuming you beat the game) with no more than four agents, despite leaving enough evidence of your actions around that everyone else should have been teaming up on you from no later than mission three. It's not like you were particularly stealthy or subtle as you mindwiped whole city blocks of civilians and cops and left at trail of burning wreckage to your target. Were there no video cameras? Even at the time, I found Syndicate's rendering of cyberpunk to be crayons-on-construction-paper at best, and it hasn't aged well. Satellite Reign sounds like it's more subtle and more thoroughly considered.
  6. I do. I do enjoy RTS games as well, but not ones where APM matters. I want to be able to drop a unit of space marines somewhere, tell them "search and destroy", and then let them be without having to micromanage their abilities or tell tell them exactly where to go. They're supposed to be space marines, not drones; I shouldn't have to tell them to take cover or when to pop stims or whatever. As long as things haven't gone pear-shaped I don't want to hear from them. Ideally, I'd even like to be able to attach an artillery firebase to a few sets of troopers and allow them to call strikes in. That is, I want to be a general, not the entire command structure from general on down. That's not incompatible with the concept of the RTS.
  7. I think that's the core of it. I find myself put off SC2 because I find it's reflexes and gambits instead of strategy. I want chess, SC2 gives me speed chess with a minute on the clock.
  8. That sounds like a recipe for trench warfare, though. I'd far rather see something that moved the game away from APM and microing towards more tactical play. I'm thinking, for instance, of Dark Reign, where you could set fairly complex AI on units (for example, you could tell something "go raiding, come back for repair when you're at 25% health", and then you could leave it be and go pay attention to something else). Dark Reign also had paths that were independent of units, so you could lay down (say) a couple of paths for a pincer attack, and then tell group 1 to attack move along path A, and group 2 to attack move along path B. We may ultimately want completely different games, come to that.
  9. I've been watching this game with the hope that it would be good and the fear that it would be mediocre. It sounds like I need to pick it up.
  10. Episode 338: Legion Wargames

    Yes. As someone with a background in (software) game development, it's fascinating to hear a practical discussion about what goes on over on the far side of the fence. I may need to grab some of those Canadian games too; most of Canadian territorial history isn't traditionally wargameable (our rebellions were small and short-lived, most of the militarily interesting things happened in the French/British clash and 1812), so it's nice to see someone making an honest attempt.
  11. Episode 335: Thea: The Awakening

    The "reviewer who hates everything" schtick can be fun, but it's hard to sustain over the long haul; see, for example, Mr. Cranky Rates the Movies. Sooner or later, the schtick takes on a life of its own, and the quality of the reviews start to suffer.
  12. Episode 334: Comebacks

    I was listening to this episode while playing http://js13kgames.com/games/compact-conflict/index.html and it particularly resonated; it's a 12 turn quick play Risk-alike on a randomly generated map. The nature of the game makes it fairly obvious when a bad roll of the dice or a bad decision has doomed you to some suboptimal end in the game; a two-way tie for second place where you wind up stalemated with another player while a third conquers the board, usually. As a result, I find a significant percentage of my plays wind up with me resigning at the end of turn 1 or 2.
  13. Episode 333: Prison Architect

    The base management part of Evil Genius is largely Dungeon Keeper with a 60's spy flick coat of paint, though, and it was less important than the (oddly abstract) plots & capers screen; base management was a distraction from what you were supposed to be doing (stealing stuff, breaking things, muscling rivals, killing & kidnapping people on the world stage) rather than the focus of the game. I've played a fair amount of Evil Genius, and while I see the parallels, I'd have said there's a fairly large gulf between the two games.
  14. Episode 333: Prison Architect

    This is what's kept me away from the game; I'm usually purely about mechanics, but... some small part of my brain says "the line between that and Concentration Camp Architect looks mighty blurry...".
  15. 3MA has a Patreon

    I'm in the same place here; being able to ask questions is enough of a perk, and I'm fine with everyone being able to hear the results. I subscribe to Linux Weekly News. Their model is, subscribers get exclusive access to this week's articles, and everything goes free after a week. So, if you don't mind your news being a week old, it's free. If you want stuff when it's new, you subscribe. It seems to work pretty well, and a week is actually plenty of time. Especially if you have forums where people are talking about it... I'd be perfectly content if patreon-exclusives were timed release for non-subscribers, and that would also fix the podcast manager problem without having to resort to extra work like setting up a password-locked patreon rss feed or something similar.
  16. 3MA has a Patreon

    I've gotten push emails. For me, if I back something like this, I don't mind getting relevant updates and occasional summaries. It crosses the boundary into spam if the updates are too regular ("Daily Update: Nothing Happening Today, so Let Me Tell You About My Lunch"), or if it runs to cross-promotion and feels like someone has stuck a Marketing Channel tag on things (eg: it's fine to mention eSports Today in updates, but if you were to start sending out regular 3MA Patreon updates whose clear and only purpose was to pimp eSports Today, and if those cross-marketing updates were to be a significant fraction of the traffic, it would cross the spam line for me). A weekly "state of the world" summary email (this week's episode, any relevant news, polls, goals, requests, deadlines, whatever) and the occasional special bulletin would be firmly on the proper side of the line, at least for me.
  17. Episode 332: Chaos Reborn

    That assumes one has an intuitive grasp of probability math, however; not everyone can look at the difference between 55% and 72% and immediately grasp whether the increased odds balance with the resource expenditure. The odds don't change by knowing the results, but for someone who isn't intimately familiar with probability they can be a useful teaching tool *about* probability and how it meshes with resource use. Repeated exposure to the extra information (whether the boost was successful) can help someone develop a more intuitive grasp of how the boost affected the odds, and whether it was worth it. Think of it as the game showing its work.
  18. Episode 332: Chaos Reborn

    This game makes me wish for a modern reboot of Archon: The Light And The Dark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark Come to think of it, a modern Archon would be a hell of an e-sport too.
  19. 3MA has a Patreon

    Well, this is the straw that made me get a patreon login. I can only speak for myself, of course, but given that 3MA is being done pro bono, if you just want to just roll around in the cash or use it to pay for food or pleasantries or rent, I've no objection. I'm in for $10 per month, and that seems reasonable for what I'm already getting. If anything else happens, I'll call it a bonus.
  20. Episode 321: Act of Aggression

    TA remains my favorite RTS; we played the hell out of it in office matches when it was newish. There were some nasty exploits (one guy we played with would build hundreds of stealth fighters and send them all in to your base at once, which would lag your machine so badly that it turned into a slide show; if the automated defenses weren't up to the task you were destroyed), but it remains the most fun I've had in an RTS. In particular, there were so many strategies you could pursue that you could never really be sure what would come over the hill at you. And man, those classic "shit, we haven't heard from Dave for 15 minutes, I'd best start preparing for a saturation nuke strike" moments. Or the time where I'd completely lost, but I had one underwater fusion reactor in a little lake somewhere, which was enough that my commander could keep his stealth system active, and I was sneaking around the map trying to find the enemy commander to d-gun him and force a draw. It didn't work, but it was a riot.
  21. Episode 319: Armello

    I've played Talisman a fair number of times, and... yeah, it's basically kind of terrible. If we're going to have a board game episode, why not Dune? I think that's still my favorite board game by a wide margin. I understand there's a de-branded version called Rex now; friends have strongly recommended it, and it's actually in print, I believe.
  22. Episode 303: Heroes of the Storm

    I see the thing that autotranslates M O B A to Lords Management is still working.
  23. Episode 302: The 4X Genre

    That's fallen out of favor in computerized 4x games, but it's not unheard of. In Warlock, for instance, your city improvements occupy hexes on the main map. Dark Wizard, Master of Monsters, Brigandine and the like moved their economics/force management to an inter-battle screen similar to Dawn of War: Soulstorm, but they were turn-based hexmap strategy games. At least some versions of Warlords had a simple enough city management UI that it could be up while the map was still up, and only really took over the screen for production vectoring. If I was working on a 4x, city management is one of the things I'd probably look to reduce in complexity. There's a really good 4x game waiting to be made for the first person/team who can boil the genre down to its essentials.
  24. Episode 302: The 4X Genre

    What a lot of 4X games are missing is focus. The same problem came up in the "Lost In Space" podcast (ep. 216); we're doing a space 4X, so clearly the player needs to design every ship in their fleet, micromanage colony layout, micromanage a research department that spans many stars and yet can only research one thing at a time, hey, what if we make the player manage ground combat too!... I think ultimately Gods & Kings and Brave New World made Civilization 5 a worse game, for example. All they really added was more plates to keep spinning. What it needed was something to take you away from your immediate concerns; a goal to make you stretch yourself, like perhaps something valuable you can only seize by building a far-off colony. Instead, they added things that force you to expend nearly all your efforts tuning your victory point engine. Tuning a victory point engine is fun in a boardgame where the problems are caused by the cunning of your friends. In a video game where it's all AIs and automated systems causing the problems, you need something more. One of the best 4X games I recall playing was Armada 2525. Not the recent Armada 2526, but the original DOS game, which was completely different. It had a smaller scale, fairly simple and understandable mechanics, and played fairly fast. It was lots of fun, you always felt like you were making meaningful decisions, and it never felt like you were spending all your time making a purple bar fill faster than every other player's purple bar so you could win a "culture victory" or whatever the designer calls "my victory points crossed the win threshold before anyone else's". I think it's the problem that Bruce has articulated in the past; it's now so easy to build massively complicated games that it takes real restraint to build a game well scaled to human intellect and enjoyment. It's all to easy to quadruple the size of the map, or allow thousands or millions of units to take the field.
  25. I occasionally wonder if you might get a better WW1 game if you were put in charge of R&D, production and logistics, but had no control over the troops. The combat would be AI driven, and the AI generals would make requests, but they'd operate on the basis of what they had and what you could get them, where, when, and with how much (and how accurate) advanced notice.