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Day 7. Started to work on spells, also some backend stuff for large clever formation AI stuff that might not work. The basic idea of spells is that they are pickups that are slowly generated (after a delay) while the player is unpaused, thus encouraging the player to not constantly pause the game, and to move his units around the pitch. Picking up a pickup gives the player one of a deck of shuffled spell cards, which the player can carry up to 7 at a time. If the player picks up any more, the oldest card is discarded. (This is a good way to get rid of the harmful backlash cards) The player clicks on as many cards as they want to cast them. If multiple spells are cast, they are held in a queue and then cast one by one, with a 1 second interval in between. In general, spells either do damage, stunning the enemy, provide the player with buffs, alter the game in some other way, or affect cards. Already stunned enemies explode when stunned again, potentially triggering a chain reaction. Only implemented the random explosions spell so far: Tried to think up some spells: ??? - random explosions that stun the enemy ??? - Targetted attack, stuns and pushes them aside ??? - Random periodic lightning bolts stun enemies near your cursor Babywall - Creates a wall that slows the enemy TBS mode - all units with orders complete them really quickly, then are stunned for a short time ??? - for a time, all your units have area of effect tackle ability ??? - for a time, all your units move really fast ??? - for a time, when you shoot the ball, you go with it Diplomacy - charms an enemy for a really long time. (Charmed enemies will always pass the ball to you and will auto-tackle their teammates.) ??? - cast a spell twice, one after the other ??? - cast a spell three times, one by one ??? - transmorphs spells into new spells ??? - drops X more spell pickups on to the battlefield ??? - collects all the pickups on the map, and the ball if it's free. ??? - Creates smoke cloud that blinds opponents, referee for a time ??? - Creates a second ball ??? - allows you to set waypoints for the ball, then shoot it like a XCOM blaster bomb Gun - all units shoot automatically at enemies close to them, pushing them away/slowing them ??? - Backlash! [Has a bad effect/Must be cast/Returns to deck] ??? - Reshuffle

It would be fun if you gave the AI 'real lives' that the player has to exploit to win, in true Neptune's Pride style.

That's actually quite similar to what I am using, googolplexbyte. The problem with the wolf hunting code is that no wolf actually goes in for the kill, and the wolves bunch up too much in the chase. So I'm making them avoid each other throughout the chase, and just making them run at the player.

Day 6. Today I have taught the AI how to defeat me in soccer. Also, tackling now works. Unfortunately the AI isn't resetting to its starting position after scoring, instead preferring to hang around the player's goal and just keep kicking the ball in over and over, racking up mega-points. That is maybe cheating.

Day 5. Some more portraits for the Thumbs done. Also AI is much more sensible now - it (tries to) effectively block the player, and also can attack and shoot for the goal! I'm still looking for sound effects/music people, btw.....

Maaaybe. Day 4: No gif unfortunately, working on some backend stuff to try and make the AI move in formation, or try and block the player. This is harder than it sounds. I'll give it another day and then I'll probably give up and just tell them to blob up at pre-set scripted locations.

Day 3: AI is still stupid, but at least they are staying on the pitch now. Maybe I'll try and overwhelm the thumbs by pure force of numbers.... Implemented a dialogue and card based UI system for spell casting. A fireball spell with screen shake, woo! Drew a little portrait of Chris Remo for exciting plot stuff.

In theory this is all preliminary art, if I have time i'll replace the circles with little sprite figures.

Day 2: Teaching a computer how to play football is hard. Well, at least they are passing the ball now, and they aren't clumping up so much any more. Also, tactical pause mode implemented. This will be important when it comes to spellcasting. Yes, there's magic in this game!

Day 1 Progress: Worked on some basic controls and ball passing: Stereotypically, white = player, red = AI. Mouse and keyboard controls. Currently AI isn't very aggressive, and certainly isn't very effective. But hey, it's a start...

If you are looking for English language first hand accounts of the Soviet perspective of WWII, I strongly recommend I Remember: http://english.iremember.ru/ They have a bunch of translated interviews with Russian war veterans, many of whom have truly amazing stories to tell. I seriously recommend taking a look if you are interested in this period of history.

The panel discussed the difficult of modelling the sudden shifts of the power balance on the Eastern front in the UoC engine. Might I suggest a board game I'm currently playing: 'No Retreat'? It seems to handle it quite well, by use of a card mechanic. As the Soviets, I find myself retreating, retreating, throwing men into the grinder to slow the German advance, then finally putting together the necessary cards and messing up the Germans' best made plans.

I think the panel are a bit too cautious in terms of trying out items/abilities/tactics. A lot of the items are a *ton* more useful than they describe. It's maybe a fault of the game that it doesn't force you to change things up, but if you do, it's very rewarding. For example, ghost grenades are fantastic - they give you a 'way out' button in any circumstance, protecting you from the enemy for one turn. This can and will save soldier's lives. I suggest the following cure to XCOM strategy rut - instead of picking the skills you are comfortable with, flip a coin. Heads, pick the ability on the left, tails pick the ability on the right. That will teach you the value of the less-used skills in no time. Also, snapshot is really good now. I'm running dual snapshot-sniper squads and kicking ass. The reduction to the snapshot penalty, the meld mechanic, the prevalence of high HP enemies that you need critical hits to kill... all of that has buffed that ability a lot. It's understandable that talent roulette lends itself to no-brainer decisions, though. Pairs of skill options are balanced against each other, but the skills in general are not. Hence it's less likely you will end up with a difficult choice in that set-up.

Heheh, I'm (not really)working on a space combat game design that is basically this. Essentially, your deck is your fleet, and when you warp reinforcements into battle out of hyperspace, that's equivalent to drawing cards into your hand. You don't design *every ship*, only your flagship, and maybe a small number of 'hero' ships that are basically special cards you get out of special events/completing side objectives. The difficulty in making the design work is ensuring the cards are different and interesting enough to combine in fun ways, and not ruining the theme in the process. The genius of the card hunter mechanic, really, is the control it takes away from the player. I mean, the problem with ship design generally is that the player can 100% control what he brings to the battle, so once he's figured out the system, he can build basically the optimal design and every battle is the same. It's a sort of self-destructive mechanic. The randomisation of the card hunter system means that even if you were to get the items you require for the 'optimal build', there's no guarantee that the cards you need would be drawn. This forces the players to react to unexpected shifts in his own capabilities. It should never be an option to build 100% mass driver ships, just like in Card Hunter it's never an option to make a character be kitted out solely with the best attack and move cards.

http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130911/srep02627/full/srep02627.html?WT.ec_id=SREP-639-20131001

Am I the only one who played STAVKA-OKH?

Your windows, flamethrowers, shotguns are useless...

I've only built nukes in SMAC, since it seemed narratively apropos there.

Like I said, the issues with Civ are emergent out of three simple axioms: 1. The game is about winning. 2. Only one player (or an alliance of players) can win. 3. A player winning ends the game. If there's a win condition that doesn't require industrialisation (for example, happiest country), then the game would abruptly end in 2000BC when someone halfway across the world builds a church or something. In the real history of the world, what happened was that people running the countries had their own individual objectives, and for many of them, their objectives were already achieved in their lifetime. You want a sandbox of history, but Civ isn't a sandbox, it's a 4X strategy game clothed in history.

You see it as rewarding a player for building a relationship early on, I see it as punishing a player for not building a relationship early on. Civilisation is already too weighted, mechanically, towards decisions made in the early game. Moving a game system that should be relevant in the late game turns it into just one more thing to juggle in the early game (where the player has a lot to deal with already), and one whose consequence is unclear for many turns. I don't think that's a good design decision.

That's more realistic, but is that more fun? It sounds like a snowball mechanic there. A civ that controls most of the nation states would see his control reinforced over time, even as he reaps the benefits overall, which basically gives him control over that part of the game.

I think if you start talking about 'success' and 'failure' with respect to human societies, imperialism is more or less the inevitable conclusion. To be successful, after all, a society has to be existent, and so a society that makes other societies *not exist* becomes tautologically the only potentially successful one. Civilisation's non-military victory conditions attempt to disguise this point, but ultimately I think are only applying labels on some underlying mechanic. A culture victory is simply a military victory with the weapon renamed. A space race win might as well be a giant nuke you blow up everyone else with. If you want to go away from imperialism in god games you need to look at games where success and failure is *not* decided on the level of an individual society, and especially not as a zero sum game. Fate of the World is one such game, or even something like XCOM. Or Crusader Kings 2, where the notion of trying to 'succeed' is less clear. To be clear, I don't think being imperialistic is neccessarily a bad thing about a game. What we see is that imperialism arises in games, because the player (and the AI) are trying to *win the game*. The difference in real life is that there is no game we are trying to win, that ideally, rulers are just trying to get their subjects through life in a pleasant way.

Self assembling flying robots. http://boingboing.net/2013/07/22/self-assembling-multi-rotor-d.html Look, humanity is doomed. Maybe we should just defect to the side that will obviously be the winners.

Man, such a long conversation about dating sims and win conditions, and no mention of Save The Date?

Some thoughts: 1. I think that keeping the game from being too complicated conflicts with a lot of ideas you've outlined. 2. War is Fun . Even outside of space, non-war related strategy is few and far between. A Crusader Kings in Spaaaace might work, but what would setting it in space really add? Sci-fi models of space societies have generally been just copies of historical ones, so you'd need a lot of original thought to make this interesting and still intuitive. 3. Needs and wants are hard to do in a simple way. Maybe something like Shogun 2's clan missions? In particular, I think that individualisation of races needs to be used carefully. This is because interaction with other races requires the player, and the AI, to understand intimately both their own priorities and those of other races. It would enormously suck to unknowingly hand victory on a platter to an enemy because you forgot that he only needs to capture Red planets that are useless to you. Having too different a tech tree would also add an obfuscatory layer before the player - if Hivers don't like the internet, what happiness boosting tech do they want? How do we encourage tech trading if techs are unique? 4. 5. Hard to do without erasing the point of doing it in space altogether. I'd say, embrace nodes and edges, but more it easier to navigate, and perhaps manipulate. If you want the player to run an empire of bazillions of worlds, then suppress the complexity of a bunch of them. The minor worlds they don't care about can be just dots that change colour, like the resource points on Company of Heroes. Let me draw a selection box around fifty worlds and tell them to build ships. Focus on making interesting core worlds, worlds with ancient ruins and stories. 6. I think the thing is, people want ships to blow up. A ship blowing up when you only have a few ships SUCKS. The Enterprise is great and storied, but what about all the ships the enterprise fought? If individual ships were so precious, the game would probably devolve into a WWI style situation where opposing fleets sit in dry dock, staring at each other, afraid to be committed, running instantly for home the moment shields dip below 80%. And that'd be no fun. Probably a Total War style compromise would be better - fleets and squadrons get characteristics, but individual ships can just die. Also, I don't like refit cycles - sending a ship back home again and again feels like the definition of busywork. 7.+8. I don't think significant tech interacts well with indirect research. People don't want to be handed a massive advantage, or miss out on one, due to the vagarities of a system they do not directly control and understand. I overall prefer choices that are direct and chunky, in any case. Carapace or Laser weapons? Click, bam. If the game calculated whether to give me carapace or laser weapons based on some complicated formula based on who I promoted and what I fought with, then it'd either feel unfairly random, or worse, could lead to the player doing perverse things to min-max results.