hexgrid

For the first 15 minutes or so of listening to this I kept thinking "M.U.L.E.! Mention M.U.L.E.!", but then Bruce brought it up. I'd love to hear a podcast about M.U.L.E., by the way; that was a brilliant little game that was literally decades ahead of its time. Offworld Trading Company sounds fascinating. I think I'm going to hold off until release; I've already got my fingers in a lot of early access pies. I imagine I'll own it the moment it shows up on Steam, GOG or Desura.

It's early access, but it's out: http://store.steampowered.com/app/241990/

I was more surprised by the lack of mention of Sorcerer King under the circumstances, but I'm not sure how the timing of the podcast recording lined up with the timing of the release.

The castle/star fort simulator would actually make a pretty good core of a game; the question is, what kind of game? I suppose you could do something like those "bridge builder" games, except the test would be "fend off this army" instead of "hold up while a train crosses". I'm picturing something a little like Gratuitous Space Battles, where you design the castle and maybe do the initial troop deployment, but when the siege starts it's hands-off. The larger question of "control the landscape here" is an interesting one, though; perhaps expanding the concept to "you have this much time, this much money, this set of people; prepare your defenses". So, hey, build three forts and clifftop redoubt if you can make the budget work. Maybe back it with a lightweight political sim where each year the local political powers eye you up and decide if/how to invade.

I don't regret backing it either, but at the same time I think we can look at parts of it (like the decision to go interplanetary within a match) as interesting (promising, cool-sounding) research projects that produced unfortunate results. There are some things that someone has to try to discover the problems, and PA covered several bases for us on that front.

I've got both Endless Legend and Endless Space. I remain unsure what to think about Legend, since I haven't yet played it for very long, but there were definitely parts of it that reminded me of Space. I've a strong suspicion I'm going to wind up disliking Legend for the same reasons. I've seen a lot of people complain that Endless Space is devoid of personality, but I don't think that's really the problem with it. The factions aren't particularly interesting, admittedly (various nearly interchangeable races with different positions on the Hippie/Warmonger/Scientist triangle, plus lightly airbrushed Tyranids...), but the same can be said for many other 4X games. The problem with Endless Space is that it's a terrible strategy game with a really slick user interface. I played the game a fair amount, partly out of curiosity and partly out of professional interest, and the conclusion I've come to is that whereas it seems like there are a lot of decisions in the game, they all fall into one of two categories; either they don't matter, or there's a clear best answer. There's a clearly visible optimal path through the game, and it's the same path on every play. For example, consider research. Sure, there are lots of things to research, but in order to expand you need the various colonization technologies and the casimir drive as quickly as possible, which means you're going to be tackling the bottom quadrant of the research graph first. The order will depend on the planets you encounter, but there will be a clear best order. After that, you'll be having happiness problems, so it'll be the left quadrant with the occasional thing from the right when your planets run out of things to build, and then you'll storm through all the military tech in the top quadrant because it'll all be less than one turn per tech by the time you need it. You could do it in a different order, but if you do you'll miss the land grab phase in a game where systems have hard limits to growth. There are heroes. You could choose not to buy them as soon as you can afford them, but they're so powerful that there's no reason not to get them unless you're deliberately handicapping yourself. Everything in Endless Space funnels you down the optimal path. That's why the game feels like it has no personality; there's only one way to play it "right", and you aren't making any interesting decisions on the way. If you veer off the optimal path, it just means it takes longer to win, and you do so by getting back on the optimal path again. Under Sid Meier's definition of a game as "a series of interesting choices", Endless Space doesn't qualify as a game.

I'm afraid I'm one of those people who likes many strategy games but just can't pull together any enthusiasm for The Sims. It made a fine podcast topic, though; just because I'm not into playing the game doesn't mean it isn't interesting to listen to people who are discussing it.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/human-resources-an-apocalyptic-rts-game Uber's new Kickstarter. Chthulu vs. The Singularity, the RTS. They say they're using the PA engine to do it, but hopefully something on the ground with (supposedly) destructable cities will solve both the bland terrain problem and the "how do I manage this map?" problem.

One of the things I really liked about the TA lineage is that it was (IIRC) the first to break away from limits on the number of units you can have selected at a time. Warcraft limited you to having 9 things selected at a time, and StarCraft bumped that up to 12 (unless they were "big" units...), while TA had hotkeys for "select all combat units", "select all units of this type", and so forth. I think the problem with PA is almost entirely a result of its big concept. If you were playing PA on a flat, constrained map with tactically interesting terrain, it would play (arguably) as well as the earlier games in its lineage. Likewise, I think if you took TA or SupCom and set them in PA levels, you'd be floundering the same way. The tools you have aren't tuned to the environment you're operating in.

I never played much Supreme Commander (I own it, but back when it was current it invariably caused my graphics card to start faulting after half an hour or so of play...), but I was pretty heavily into Total Annihilation and even had some fun with TA:Kingdoms, though it had its problems. I backed PA mostly in the hopes that it would be a modern interpretation of the TA lineage. Like this podcast, I'm not quite sure what to think about PA. I definitely agree that it seems like it's not done baking yet, and I do wish there was a better way to get an overview of what's going on. What's there I want to like, but I'm not sure if it's nostalgia for TA carrying me past a weak game. I do think (as was mentioned) that the paucity of tactically interesting terrain is a problem; where (as Rob said, I believe) TA was a game that celebrated turtling, I find PA celebrates rushing. As more of a turtle myself ("he made a sea of heavy cannon and called it peace"), I'm less enamored of PA. Hopefully they'll keep building on it, though. It has the potential to be really good.

Somewhat; I'm differentiating here between the "If I get it now, it's cheap!" crowd, and the "Must have now!" crowd. Not all of the latter crowd is interested in giving feedback, and not all of the former understand the implications of early access. I'm with the Frozen Synapse guys here; indie games never reach their market potential (the occasional Minecraft excepted...), so do everything you can to spread the game around. FS gave a free second copy with every purchase, and it seemed to work out very well for them, for example. I'm pretty sure almost any developer using early access is not as solvent as they'd like to be. Most of us would like to disappear into our offices, craft our perfect works, and loose them on the unsuspecting world. Doing the part-time carnival barker routine diverts time and effort from development. When it's a necessary evil you do it, but I'd bet even Tim Schafer (who's pretty damn good at it...) would rather just make his games rather than be out hawking for funding throughout the process. You can tell the developer's motivation from the state of the game. If the game is feature complete and (more or less) release quality but needs tuning or balancing, the devs will call it "beta" and do a limited early release, probably with a signup list. If it's not feature complete and it's still slightly (or very!) buggy, the devs will call it "early access", and they're doing it to keep the lights on, or at least to push out the date when their burn rate catches up to their bank balance. I don't have a problem with using pre-sales to explore market acceptance IF two criteria are met: - the developer needs to be very up-front about it - if they pull the plug, you need to be left with something of worth The "something of worth" could be a working game that doesn't have all the features they were hoping for, as long as it's still fun; that was a risk you signed up for when you bought in, as long as the developer made it properly clear. "Something of worth" could also be a discount on one of their other titles, or premium access to whatever they tackle next. The other way pre-sales can be used ethically to explore market acceptance is the Kickstarter model, if used as it was originally intended. You establish what you actually need for the project, ask for that much, and if you don't get it you refund everyone's pledge and everyone moves on. The problem, of course, is that many video game projects on Kickstarter have treated it as "first round seed funding" rather than "here's my budget". Or have fallen victim to the auction mentality and expanded the scope of their project in response to funding, such that the original careful plan is replaced with an adrenaline and cash fueled fantasy plan.

There's a fourth way people look at early access: - That looks cool and I'd like it to happen, but it may never come together; should I gamble on it? I think that's what bit the folks doing Spacebase DF-9, for instance; I know several people (myself included) who looked at it, and thought "Hey, that looks kind of neat... but it's $30, seems only barely functional, and if they don't get critical mass I'd wind up with the skeleton of a promising concept. Maybe I'll wait...". If everyone winds up waiting, the game tanks. I'd own DF-9 now if it had been $10. Quite possibly Clockwork Empires, too. At $30, when the developer can just up sticks and declare the game done at any time if it isn't generating the anticipated revenue, I wind up keeping my powder dry. Personally, I lean towards catering to everyone. You want to appeal to the "FIRST!" crowd, you want the feedback, you want the people who will come in early for a discount, and you want the patrons. So, I think what you do is: - start at $10, raise the price slowly as you add features, go to your release price when you hit 1.0 - offer low-cost perks to people who test, like letting them name something -- it needs to be something that costs no money, doesn't need to be shipped, and costs little development time; you don't want the tail wagging the dog. - offer a patron's pack for more ($50?) that gives them more (six?) copies of the game (they get a per-copy discount, but you just moved six copies...), and give them some similar low development cost perk -- maybe they get a special "philanthropist" supervisor? - you've already shipped at $30, so give something low-cost but nice (maybe a particularly effective soldier or worker? Maybe two extra copies to share?) to the people who've already bought in so they don't feel screwed when the price drops.

That's fair. I've always liked the XCom organization building/research model, and I'd love to see it applied in other areas; while it works just fine as the strategic layer to a tactical combat game, there's nothing inherent about that connection. It could work just as well for a city builder. Bastion is usually the example people point to for narration. It does take a lot of work, and it vastly multiplies the work to be done if you internationalize. Personally, I've fought tooth and nail to keep voice acting out of most projects I've been on; unless you're backed by a big publisher with deep pockets, it (IMO) sucks up too much time and money for the resulting payoff. The other problem with narration is that you're going to hear the same quotes an awful lot. There's only so many ways the narrator can tell you that you've run out of food. Probably the only way to make it work sanely would be to only have narration at key points; maybe have some events take place with a Pathe News frame around them, running 50% faster in sepia, with the narrator saying "New Threat from The Deep! Our brave boys hold the line as...". I wouldn't pull that one out more than a few times per game (first encounters, disasters, major accomplishments).

Ah, ok. The initial description made it sound like someone got tongue tied and there was a crash of awkward pauses or something. I played the pitch movie of Clockwork Empires to my wife, and her reaction was: "Does the game have the narrator? If the game has the narrator, you should get it.". I'm not sure what to make of the game, myself. It reminds me a little of Evil Genius, (presumably) without the oddly minimalist off-map mission board, and hopefully without some of the more glaring flaws. The cults and other weird fiction elements sound like they'll bring a lot to the game once they're fully realized. Is there nothing beyond building the colony, though? It seems like if you have a weird fiction setting, especially one meshed with a steampunk setting where one might unironically refer to a colleague as a "Gentleman Scientist" or "Lady Engineer", there ought to be some sort of investigation going on. Maybe this is me vaguely wishing the game was more like XCom Chthulu: The Colony or wanting to build a steampunk Ordo Xenos chapel, but part of the core of weird fiction is "The Written Account from the Doomed Investigator".

Now I want to hear the fire alarm bit.

If a platform has a CPU, it has strategy games on it, and some of those games are unique to that platform. As far as I'm aware, Dark Wizard is only available on SegaCD. Dragon Force was only on the Saturn. Almost all of the long-running Daisenryaku series is on console only. The Carnage Heart series has been Sony-exclusive. Koei's strategy games have been mostly console as well; there's a new Nobunaga's Ambition in the pipe, but AFAIK it's not coming to PC. I don't remember anything on PC like Valkyria Chronicles, and there's nothing like the vast array of "tactical RPGs" available on console. I also don't recall anything on PC quite like the Sangoku Musou (Dynasty Warriors) series. At first glance, it's a brawler where you play a crazy-powerful warrior laying waste to everything near you on a gigantic battlefield. That only gets you so far, though; you're massively powerful, but you're on a large, fluid battlefield with allies who aren't nearly as capable as you. If you just try to smash your way through, you'll start failing the later scenarios. You have to pay attention to the map. The battle ebbs and flows, and you need to pay attention to the critical points, get there and reinforce them before they become a crisis. If anything, it winds up playing somewhat like Caesar described his battles; you race around the battlefield averting disaster, trying to figure out if you have enough time to stay here and finish the job before that gate over there falls... There's tons of stuff on iOS as well. Native things, and things that are hard to play on PCs these days. I quite recommend Slay, for instance; it's a port of a windows game, sure, but the iOS and Android versions of it run well, and it's really well suited to a quick play on the bus or in line at the bank if you've got five minutes to kill and a craving for a simple wargame. There's also a serviceable port of the original Warlords, which remains a fun game. There's also a reportedly excellent port of Warhammer Quest, amongst many other things. Limiting yourself to PC is like only ever eating pizza. It's tasty, there's a lot of variety, but you're missing a whole world of other good experiences. The same goes for any platform. I'd love to see 3MA tackle one of Koei's long-running strategy series; Nobunaga's Ambition, Genghis Khan or Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Doing that would require a lot of time investment, and also a fair amount of hardware investment, though; old consoles or emulators, new consoles, and yes, PCs. I think it would be worth it, though; the three series above have some of the longest lineage of any computerized strategy series, and they're still being produced. The first Nobunaga's Ambition was the first game Koei ever shipped, in 1983, and there's a new one on the way. That's a 31 year history across a variety of platforms, including PC and consoles.

One thing you might consider. On the podcast, it was said that there are some games that people want featured, but are hard to review either due to time commitment or pure cost (ie: the "not all of us have ipads or copies of the game" problem). I wonder if there's a way to do per-game or per-topic funding drives in addition to whatever model you use for funding the podcast. If there was a game I wanted you guys to tackle and there was a "Add $ to make it happen sooner." button somewhere, I'd make use of it. That also goes for hardware; I'm not in a place where I can just buy you guys ipads, but if there were to be a funding drive specifically for getting hardware for some purpose (ipads, game consoles, better PC components, better recording equipment...), I'd throw some money in the pot.

If you were to follow the LWN model the idea would be (I think?) to create two podcast feeds; 3MA-subscribed and 3MA. They would contain the same actual podcasts; no extra recording or editing. The 3MA podcasts are just the 3MA-subscribed podcasts with a one-week lag. So, when you have a podcast finished to your satisfaction, you push it out to 3MA-subscribed. One week later, you push the same podcast (unaltered) to 3MA. It should (hopefully?) be very little extra work, though I've never gone through the steps of releasing a podcast myself, so I'm just guessing at how much effort it is to prime the feeds. The podcast player I use (Downcast on iOS) is capable of supporting podcast feeds that require a login and password, so I presume that's a relatively common feature. You make 3MA-subscribed take a login and password; maybe even the same one for everyone unless you're seeing way more downloads than subscribers. For subscribers, maybe you see if there's a way to flag subscription levels on these forums; maybe some sort of icon. You could also (if you wanted to, with a little more effort) stick a trailer for the current 3MA-subscribed podcast in 3MA, so that when an episode comes out for subscribers, everyone else gets a "Now Playing" to show them what they could be listening to now instead of next week if they throw some cash in the hat. For the record, personally I'd happily drop $52/yr to support the podcast, but that would probably be mid or upper tier. You'd probably want to do something like: $15/yr, $30/yr, $52/yr tiers. The difference between them would purely be a matter of "support us to the level you think you comfortably can". I think it would be workable? That said, I'm one person; I've no idea who else in the audience would consider subscribing.

I subscribe to Linux Weekly News, and have for quite a while now. They have varying levels of subscriber (starving student, professional, manager), all of which have the same access, though you do get a tag based on your subscription level in the forum. Their subscriptions are annual, IIRC, though you can put down for more than one year if you want. All of their content unlocks when it's a week old. So, subscribers get stuff a week before non-subscribers, but the back catalog is out there for everyone. They were trying to strike a balance between being invisible (ie: having everything hidden behind a paywall where nobody would ever find it) and not making any money. The result actually works fairly well; there's a mild kind of "you really ought to subscribe, that's how they keep doing what they do" social pressure, along with the pressure of not being at the front of the line when new stuff comes out, but if you're patient and aren't the sort of person who wants to comment on the forums, you can still get access to everything without paying. Subscriptions also have the benefit of being a more obvious transaction for the listener; a donation kind of feels like a tip for services rendered, while a subscription feels more like payment for future services. A tip is easy to put off, but "If I pull out my credit card I can have that podcast now instead of next tuesday". A subscription also carries the message of "doing this isn't free, if it's going to be sustainable the people who are enjoying it are going to need to pitch in". Obviously, a podcast is a different thing from a news site, though there are enough technical articles on LWN that older articles remain relevant the way 3MA back issues do; there's enough similarity to draw some useful parallels. The main problem with the LWN model is how to release a podcast to subscribers a week early without screwing up people's podcast programs. There would probably have to be separate subscriber and non-subscriber lists.

I believe there's a Guns of August boardgame as well; I think I played it back in the 1990s. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4358/guns-august It may be the one the Matrix game is based on. I don't recall it very well; I vaguely recall it was mostly about attrition.

Pick and choose as you please: 1) I'd be interested in a discussion of scope in games. There's been plenty of mention of it on and off (Bruce's theory that the mid 1990s produced lots of good games in part because of technical limits of scope and complexity, for example, or the discussions of single-scenario games vs. whole-conflict games), but I'm not sure there's ever been a direct discussion of where the sweet spots lie and why. 2) The "forgotten wars" and "wishlist" podcasts were fun; it would be interesting to hear a reprise of them. I really wish there was more about pre-modern Asia, personally. 3) What do you think of Enemy Starfighter? 4) What other games on the horizon look interesting? Is GalCiv 3 worth getting yet? What about the new sorta-SMAC? What are you personally looking forward to? 5) On the WW1 theme, I vaguely recall a discussion about a game set in the Russian revolution. Have there been any others?

I would be all over a "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" version of this.

I would love someone to build this; I've wanted it for years. It wouldn't need to be Dune per se, just that kind of decadent, formalized, faction-riven space empire. I'd build it myself, but I've already got too many side projects on the go.

http://imperiagame.wordpress.com/ You play the newly-minted emperor of a longstanding space empire, and Also, to Chris King: A Victoria-style game set in the Dune universe or something like it. You know you want to make it. Edit: Ok, I should have listened to the whole podcast first. I wrote the above about a quarter of the way in. Yay! But what I'd love to see is something in a decadent existing faction-riven empire, rather than the MOO style of expanding new empires.

The Lego Movie parallels to city builders Troy alludes to are oddly strong.