hexgrid

I think the complaint about wonder victory lies in the inevitable "I'm inside your borders unopposed with a million tanks, and you win because you built an opera house? If the blasted game would let me, next turn your opera house would be my campaign headquarters!". Games teach you to win by the rules rather than winning by what makes sense, but sometimes the disconnect grows large enough that the mind rebels. Wonder and culture victories are often examples of that.

I always found the problem in games like Civilization is that the military path is something you have to commit to, and you pretty much give up everything else to do it. I think it's the single item production queue that does it; unless you have the cash on hand to buy things outright, a city that's producing military units is otherwise stagnating. As Rob said, once you start down the military path, you have no other options; those turns you spent building a spearman instead of a grainary are effectively costing your city not just immediate development, but compound interest on that development for the rest of the game. The only way out of that is to make sure everyone else gets set back more than you set yourself back, and the only real mechanism for that in the Civilization games is to run through their territories with fire and a sword. I think an answer to the problem can be seen historically; proxy wars, behind the scenes funding, supporting destabilizing groups, recruiting or funding privateers, intelligence services, economic sanctions, misdirection, sabotage, industrial espionage, buying off or ruining allies... there are lots of counters to military power that could be deployed in a suitably designed game. Consider the Cold War; the two superpowers never directly engaged each other in battle, but they did nearly everything else.

From a development point of view, especially from an indie point of view, part of the reason the PC is coming back is that the iOS development ecosystem is toxic. If you aren't free to play, it's very hard to get any traction. There are three main problems: 1) Discoverability in the app store is dismal. If you aren't on the top 10 list, you're in a sea of also-ran apps with no good mechanism for searching or tagging. Whenever Apple crows about the vast number of apps in their store, remember yours is just one of those, and even on the ipad they only put a handful of search results on each page. 2) Users have been trained to think that if something costs more than $0.99, it's overpriced. You can try selling for more, but it's a major gamble, especially because of: 3) Aggressive, abusive cloning. You know that game 2048 that was so hot recently? It was a clone of a game called Threes. Search for something like Flappy Bird to see how bad it's gotten. Some people are surviving on iOS in games, but it's basically Thunderdome.

I finally got a chance to listen to this. I've been wondering for a while about buying the game; I've got the original Warlock, as well as Fallen Enchantress and Endless Legend. It may not be completely fair to judge Endless Legend yet; it's early access, IIRC, and while the game is technically sound (no crashes, looks decent, runs reasonably on good hardware) it's kind of lifeless as yet. Of the three I have, I think I like Warlock the best. I think it's because it has the least fiddling around with inconsequential details; I don't feel like I should be looking at Sneedville to determine whether the grainery or the aquaduct should be manned this turn. It does have a kind of a tactics rpg flavor to it; in some ways it reminds me more of the Age of Wonders series or Dark Wizard from the Sega CD. Did I mention you should play Dark Wizard? You should play Dark Wizard. It sounds like I should be getting Warlock 2, but it raises a question: If I were to get only one, should I get Warlock 2 or the latest Age of Wonders?

More please. Sets of three or four are probably about right, but there's lots of scope for interesting comparisons. Setting (ie: like your Vietnam series) is interesting; other conflicts would make interesting subject matter, but so would (for instance) comparing the Junta board game with the Tropico series. Or different models of electoral systems or political campaigns. Mechanics would make an interesting common thread as well.

It was a great interview. With respect to the Stalingrad vs. Vietnam thing, though, I assume part of the reason games showed up so quickly for Stalingrad is that the US wasn't directly involved. I don't imagine the Russians or the Germans were making many games about Stalingrad for quite a while afterwards.

Ok, that's good. Ruse pesters me for my UPlay login, and it's one of those "that's written on a piece of paper somewhere in a stack of paper on my desk in the other room, screw it, I'll play Unity of Command instead" things.

The thing that's kept me away from the series is the thing that kept me away from Ruse, even though I actually bought Ruse; UPlay. I liked Ruse, and it sounds like the Wargame: _____ series is pretty good, but I just can't be bothered fighting user-hostile DRM to try to get to the fun bit when there are so may other games that just let me play.

Keep it up as far as I'm concerned.

Unless you're one of the lucky few that works for a self-funded team that can afford to go silent-running, you've got "customers" whether they're the actual players who want this thing, publishing reps, brand managers, "project foremen", or any of a thousand other varieties of "stakeholder". With the actual players you have some leeway; they actually want to play this thing someday. Whereas (from personal example) on a normal project you can have the Italian branding office of the IP holder suddenly lean in when the game is supposedly released to manufacturing and require that in the Italian SKU the splash screen logo be a different shade of blue. Or else legal pulls the rights. Cue panicking publisher, and a 2 minute fix in photoshop that reset the whole QA and approvals pipeline, delaying shipping by a month. Or you get the classic thing where late in the project a bunch of people financially tied to the project who never showed any interest in it before and have no understanding of the development process suddenly start demanding changes; all the characters should be wearing trilbys instead of fedoras, this level should be set at night, those cars that are a static part of the level geometry need to be driveable, there need to be hundreds of pedestrians wandering around here, hey, when I drive into a crowd of pedestrians I want to see all their trilbys fly off... And suddenly you're a year from shipping again, when you thought you were in late beta. Which often leads to the classic: "We've spent two years on this, and it doesn't look like it at all. Head office is furious. We're throwing it all out and starting again from scratch." followed six months later by "We've spent two and a half years on this, and it doesn't look like it at all. Head office is furious..." ad nausium. The players want the game. They may not be educated in the development process, but quite frankly they're better educated in it than a lot of producers I've worked with. More importantly, the players want a fun game, and they want to actually play it some day. Maybe they want more than you can deliver, or something only vaguely related to what you're working on, but ultimately they want the game. They aren't "protecting their IP" or trying to fit things into financial quarters or walmart shelf slot allocations, they aren't trying to counter other games, or "appeal to _____ demographic" or tick marketing boxes or "the game has to have boss fights, it's expected" or "zombie games are selling well, what if we made them zombies?" or "let's talk about monetization strategy and ARPU" or any of the thousand other concerns that the traditional publishing model foists on development. I would far rather deal with the people who are going to be playing the game. Maybe they don't understand development, but you can teach them, show them. And at least all of their demands, reasonable or not, are aimed towards making a game they want to play.

Congratulations on 100000000 episodes, and reaching your ninth bit! I'm firmly in the "more focus in 4X games please" camp. If I'm going to be designing ships, I'd like that to be the focus of the game, not an ancillary subsystem I can't avoid.

It's the former; check his twitter feed.

I'd be interested to hear Rowan & Frazer's opinions of Dark Wizard, which is/was a fantasy semi-4x semi-RPG for SegaCD. The interface is a little (ok, very) clunky by modern standards, but I found it to be an excellent campaign. These days you can find the rom (and apparently decent emulators) floating around, assuming you can't find the disk and the hardware. I've got the disk and the hardware, so I play it the old fashioned way. I mention Dark Wizard because it does have a strategy/tactics split, but the game is mostly tactical. The strategy level is mostly about how you split your forces; you can only fight in one territory at a time, the other border territories need to be garrisoned, and the strength of the garrisons determine how long they can hold out. One of the things I really like about DW is that if you take all the tactical maps and overlap them, they map the entire theater; each battle is between two (or more) strong points, and the strong point you take this time (and the surrounding map) is the launch point for a subsequent attack. I actually bounced off of Age of Wonders because of Dark Wizard; the graphics weren't as good (320x224 early 90s console graphics), but it was a much better strategy game. I'm looking forward to trying AoW3 to see if that's changed.

I too am hoping for a Spring Offensive of Wargames. There are so many interesting possibilities, and the shows have been great.

Excellent podcast. Things are getting easier than they used to be, but 3D graphics can still be a major investment both in time and effort. For a developer, especially in strategy games, you're often between Scylla (the theoretical expectations of the potential audience and potentially less theoretical expectations of a publisher) and Charybdis (the giant sucking money and time vortex that is 3D). I'm hoping we're gradually moving past it, but we still have vestiges of the "2D looks old and cheap" problem. 3D is also potentially quite expensive for terrain, mostly because of the foliage. Manmade features are relatively easy to model within a sane polygon budget, as is the landscape itself. Trees are a huge modelling problem; making a forest that doesn't either look like a bunch of cardboard tree standees or like a giant plush green beanbag tossed onto the landscape is not easy, and doing it within a sane polygon budget is a major challenge. The result of this tension is often compromises that only really make sense if you were directly involved in the technical and political decision making process.

Hills are tactically useful; they let you see further, they let you shoot down at your enemy, and charging downhill is rather easier than charging uphill. Hills are definitely valuable in a lot of cases. What they aren't, usually, is *decisive*, and that's the critical distinction here.

Yeah, the classic problem (mentioned in the podcast) is the old "but you've got nothing there but a shot-up supply truck, and I've got three divisions of tanks in the next hex!" thing. I remember when I was a relatively newly minted wargamer having the epiphany about winning by the rules, not by common sense. Which, having been in (for instance) a WW2 game where Japan bombed the continental USA to dust from air bases in Morocco, has always stuck with me.

This podcast made me realize I actually own Children of the Nile (I got it as part of a GOG sale, I'm sure), so I'm digging my way into that now. It occasionally amazes me how god games are often the ones that make you feel the most helpless; if I was down there on the ground I could get stuff done.

Just stick a "II" after the title, and nobody will ever know.

The 8bit and 16bit eras are treasure troves of forgotten ideas, many of which were excellent.

I've been playing the game for a while now, and... uh... it seems a *lot* like they may have borrowed some of their soundtrack from Azel Panzer Dragoon Saga. Enough so that if I were them I'd be seriously worried about legal liability, and whether any of the rest of the soundtrack is similarly compromised. Edit: Compare World9.ogg from the soundtrack to this:

I grabbed Pandora, and I'm enjoying it. Notable: when I installed it there was a patch, which I let it install. When I ran it, there were options for fonts, and one of them had "large" in the name. I took that, and haven't had much trouble reading the gui.

Yes, that too! I think I first tuned in around episode 20 or so, and the podcast has never failed to entertain and enlighten. I listen to several podcasts, and sometimes I build up a backlog of episodes (ie: right now I've got 3 Crate & Crowbar episodes, 2 Game Design Roundtable episodes and a few others kicking around waiting to be listened to), but I never get a backlog of 3MA; I always find myself making time to listen to it as soon as it is feasible. I've actually (partly thanks to an hour long train commute) listened though the whole archive of episodes several times. Any chance of releasing the long-lost episode 1 in some form so I can complete the set? And yes, Rob, some day when I can scrape up the time and if someone doesn't beat me to it, I'll build that star fort simulator you said you wanted in... what was it, episode 64? There's a lot of condensed wisdom in 3MA. With my gamer hat on it exposes me to games and genres I might not otherwise have noticed; Pandora, for instance, went right under my radar. With my developer hat on, there is a wealth of thoughtful analysis and observation that is immensely useful. I'm also not above enjoying it when the hosts let go a bit and rip up a game that richly deserves it. Keep up the excellent work!

It's kind of too bad you couldn't have done the Banner Saga episode next week: "We'll be moving slowly over to RPGs, and to set the stage here's a spiritual descendent of Final Fantasy Tactics...". I might never have known Pandora existed were it not for 3MA, and now I'm probably going to wind up getting it. I wonder if Matrix (or the developers publishing through them) realize how difficult they've made it for strategy gamers to discover their wares? If they were available on Steam or GOG or Desura or something I might have stumbled across it. I find the Matrix website reminds me of a parts catalog for a component manufacturer (pages 34-41 ... bolts, pages 42-45 ... flanged bolts, ...) and I've yet to find a web browser that really gets along with the giant horizontal scrollbar of all their products. I think the answer to the podcast question of "why hexes?" is that the developers have a previous game that appears to be hex-based as well. I'd be shocked if Pandora isn't built around the previous game's core, especially with a small developer like this.

AI is a hard problem; I've done a little, and it really is just an ugly problem. I've got a simple strategy game right now that's somewhat on the shelf because of the AI; right now it's just too good at playing the game, and will swarm over and crush the other players. A human player can survive and possibly win, but only by adopting the same boring build-and-steamroll tactics that the AI uses. So, you can win, but only at the cost of the game being deadly boring. That's for a game that has simple rules the AI can understand easily, and no hidden information. As the complexity of the AI's problem space increases, the AI falls behind human players because programming intuition is currently an art rather than an engineering discipline. When you have a mathematically solvable problem, your AI can play better than most people. When you have a vague probability landscape with semirational actors (ie: the players), the AI a babe in the woods. Soren's solution for this is reasonable; design the game for the AI. If you can balance the math with the prediction and probability just right, you can have the AI be competitive without being overwhelming, and you can remove sticking spots in the game where the AI gets confused.