ilitarist

As far as I understand with many regulars you can just let them talk about the games they really like and you get yourself a 2 hour show. It'd be great to have episodes like this instead of kinda forced discussions waiting to get off the rails into a more interesting theme as it happened there. Troy constantly talks about how good Age of Mythology is but I don't recall 3MA ever having a proper show about it. Maybe they should not try to appease to mythical trendy strategy player but get more of shows about things they themselves love.

Oh, what a trip to the past. I remember how Dark Reign looked and some map layouts but I don't remember anything about gameplay. But Rob is spot on about those old games being about chosing all the troops and sending them to their death. About the time Red Alert 3 came out I remember snobs talking about it being too simple compared too all those RTS like Company of Heroes, Age of Empires 3 and others. You know, games with complex tactics and economy. But there were sane people who said RA3 is one of those games that can keep the RTS genre alive. Because your average Joe can come back from work, start the game, drink some beer, create tank army, destroy enemy base, see funny cutscene. It's a common agreement kitchensink design and listening to hardcore players killed RTS, isn't it? Funny thing about KKnD. It was translated to Russian by pirates - common occurrence in the 90's. And they translated plot as Ukrainian nationalists fighting Russian drunk bandits. Yeeeeaaaah.

One strategy game that aims at that short size is... Worms series! Those are almost party games, really. I think they're almost as addictive and easy to get into as fighting or racing games. They all have single-player campaigns or scenarios of some sorts but I'm not sure if it's really playable that way. BTW, they say the latest entry, Worms WMD, is the best one since Armageddon.

It's alive! Glad to have you back, guys. I've just been to China and as a person spending most of his spare time on video games I have to say that Chinese are FREAKING NERDS. They put their League of Legends characters on glorious Western Sprite! On a more serious note they have a very special relations with the Internet - for them blocked Google is not really a problem cause they don't have Google, they have many local replacements for global services. You don't hear about those much because they're not interested in expanding. Most of the services I saw there blew my mind with their scope, some of them (like integration of electronic payment, mobile phone scanners, couriers, shops and freaking street beggars who can be payed by freaking scanning their QR-code) are beyond anything you see in the rest of the world. Same thing with games. Internet is everywhere so I constantly saw people watching LoL livestreams on the street or in subway. I saw huge number of people playing casual match-3 games. Many played unfamiliar things - tactical things a la Disgaea or Final Fantasy Tactics. It may be a stereotyping but I feel their gaming culture is very different. For China, Korea and Japan games are either books or hobby, sometimes both. Even bookish games like Final Fantasy insist on adding bonus dungeons and side objectives requiring twice as much time as the base game to complete via grinding. It's even more apparent when you compare similar genres: Elona is a roguelike similar to ADOM or Nethack but it's a sort of perpetuum mobile that also has some sort of objective and permadeath (although it's not that perma IIRC). It's a game you're supposed to play for ages even if you do it in a short chunks. It's sort of close to clickers but with a huge learning curve. I think the same is true for many popular Eastern games as well as games popular in the East such as some MMORPGs or strategy games. It's somewhat admirable way of playing: they probably treat gaming the same way we treat stamp collecting or bonsai. Meanwhile even today gaming is somewhat shameful in our culture, treating it as something more than occasional recreation would raise a brow and make your father look at you with a Tommy Lee Jones expression. Another point about clickers: Bryan Raynolds (Civilization 2, Rise of Nations) has betrayed us and made DomiNations. It tricks you into thinking it's a Rise of Nations Mobile, but it's really a freaking clicker. Couple of hours into it (not counting the time it ticked its timers in the background) I was presented a choice of building one of Wonders of the World, each having different bonuses. It occurred to me that this was a first time the game presented me with somewhat real choice, previously I had at best placement problem of putting new building in a way that I have more free space left. Uninstalled and cried.

> couple of months ago You mean in April, more than 4 months ago. Not that I want EL episode that much, I'm more concerned about repeating gaps in 3MA schedule. Do they have some problems?

You've started talking about Chechnya and then left it for later. I wonder what were you going to say.

Finished the book some time ago. It was a great read, thanks. I was surprised it didn't concentrate on military action that much - it basically skipped over the first day of battle and that was the day when Union army. It also had historical epilogue about all of the characters and Longstreet - basically the main character of the book - felt very different from the book character. Made me look deeper into him, especially with him being author avatar with all this preaching about modern defensive warfare. Thanks again, didn't expect historical fiction to be that down to earth and concentrated and still not boring.

This is a topic invented for discussion. I share your disgust for customization, guys - it's a part of tactical combat problem, you either made it redundant or everything else is redundant unless you're XCOM. I also have an addition. Games that promise unique content irritate me. You know when you start as Rome in Total War game and you get intro video, texts, units, all that stuff. You think you'll have same level of uniqueness for other factions. No you won't. I remember how Crusader Kings 2 disenchanted me. First I got those diplomatic messages like "In fact, I won't even step inside the same room as you" and such. I thought this stuff depended on person and I won't get different responses dependend on character stats, traits, relations, culture. Nope. Only religion seem to affect the result. Muslims have much better insults. That's a lost opportunity and it doesn't seem like it would be hard to implement. Similar to seeing faction units being just recolored versions of default units. Stellaris is much better in this regard, by the way. There are still few of unique personalities but I hope for the best.

Space Rangers are definitely the most Pirate-like game. It's sort of like your usual space trader sim, so you can hunt pirates, be a pirate, trade and get fetch quests. But it also has mini-games. Like arcade fighting in cyperspace (usual fighting is turn-based tactics), RTS for planetary conquests, and, most importantly, choose-your-own-adventure quests. Those can involve heavy scripting so you get very complex and long stories like spending your time in jail for piracy. You can become criminal authority and even earn some cash in jail by attending all sorts of activities. Dozens of more regular quests are about exploring abandoned facilities, managing ski resort, winning a music talent shows, participating in a mini-RPG VR game, playing MTG-style card games and so on. This game went under the radar because of poor translation. It was recently rereleased as Space Rangers HD and I recommend it to everybody who wants something like Pirates. Be warned, it has sense of humor that may feel irritating.

Yes, CK2 has hints of a "historical" feel in systems like ambitions and titles. My guy had ambition to become a king and killed many people for it, he was excommunicated and got nickname The Devil. It's nice but once he's dead all of it doesn't matter except of small tyranny getting to the heir. It could be so much more like giving eternal/long lasting reputation like "descendand of THAT guy" or personal decision for every descendand to be like The Devil or to do all you can to fight the reputation. Or make descendands of The Conqueror feel the burden of the legacy and force them to be more warlike. Even nickname holder himself should be affected.

@spacerumsfeld Thanks, just what the doctor ordered! This was a very, very, very interesting podcast. In forces me to react with a wall of text. You've mentioned unplausability of history. I think it's a very important in historic game and it's often played in a cheap way. In Hearts of Iron AFAIK daring things like Munchen agreement are the railroaded, very likely thing even though in real life it required luck and merit. Same for things like fall of France in WW2 - it happened so it had to be made trivial for German player to do it. Things like that should be achievements. In EU4 it's not quite like this, but it suffers from another problem: its system are unable to comprehend important things that happened in reality. EU4 has no systems to portray partitions of Poland - more or less peaceful dissolution of one of the biggest European states. It doesn't really portray colonial fight for independence, it breaks when Napoleonic things happen, or Americans trade and assimilate Native Americans. It doesn't force historic outcomes but it doesn't go for everything that happened historically. It's getting there: they've added better colonies (still not great) and forced Religious Wars but we still are far away from sandbox that at least can portray everything that more or less really happened. Same with CK2: it can't portray some important people who switched between religions when it suited them (most prominently Grand Dukes of Lithuania converted from Pagan to Catholic to Orthodox when needed), it doesn't have alliances between Christians and Muslims. Curiously games like Civilization are so abstracted they can do it better. Civ4 Rhye's and Fall mod for Civilization had just added historical starting place and time, some historic events - and it created a system of plausible history. Just tell yourself that those hundreds of real-life states are represented by barbarians or as united civilizations. You can have partitions of Poland there, it's called culture flip. You can have religion switching. Cause you don't have that level of detail. Another thing about historical events: that's because they're events. Games are struggling with this idea for a long time but I'm sure alternative history (or grand strategy games) should embrace the fact they're about history. You need events not to just simulate Pearl Harbor, you need scripts that recognize Pearl Harbor. Remember, say, Rome Total War. When you had a great battle it stayed on a map. You saw it afterwards. That's the thing I'm talking about. If we're talking about, say, Crusader Kings, we should recognize the Battle of Zlampanie where forces led by Duke Bob of Aquitane has beaten the King of France. Give Duke Bob trait "Winner of Battle of Zlampanie". Make French hate him for it. Make Aquitans love him for it. Create century-spanning rivalry between French and Aquitanes. Trigger event that would celebrate anniversary of this battle. When I build a monument later call it "A monument for Duke Bob, winner of Battle of Aquitane". Make French destroy it when they conquer the province with this monument. Let French have a great celebration if they ever win a bigger battle against Aquitanes. Make grandchild of Duke Bob hear the tale about the battle and get hate for French for it as well as force him to become military leader. Or forget about battles, let kings build their own Notre Dam that will become the symbol of their country later. Make famous treacheries known and later immortalized by bards and writers giving descendands of the betrayer reputation hit and present them with a choice of how to react. Don't create a chain of events that creates Napoleon, recognize some great leader as a Napoleon figure and let him become as famous and important as Napoleon was, let everybody in the world know Not-Napoleon is a thing and let people write books about him, love him and hate him. The closest thing to this are some CK2 events (Joan of Arc and demon child), but those do not leave lasting effect. Civilization 5 has some of it: Archaelogy system is not great but it leads you to real abandoned cities and fields of battle which is great. Plus you remember art from past eras even though it's immersion breaking as you can have Fur Elise in 350 BC. Or, by the way, Borodino. It's funny how you can call it obscure even though it was the biggest battle in history up to WW1 I think. Anyway there indeed it's hard to make a dynamic campaign cause it wasn't a decisive battle and it was more of a strategic and political initiative. Russians have retreated to force Napoleon to support huge supply infrastructure and were ready to give him empty supply-less Moscow. But you can't give away your capital without a battle so they had to fight and not get obliterated.

Hadn't finished listening to it yet but you reminded me how I have to get into Ultimate General. Cause on paper it's an only wargame I can get into. Sadly, not being American, I don't know anything about Gettysburg except what the movie Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter told me. Can you direct me to any good sources to be prepared in a gamey way of preparedness? The game itself seems to have very specific assumptions of what I should now about the battle and my general knowledge about American Civil War doesn't seem to help and the game manual is not helping.

I feel HoI as a series suffers from this eternal problem of being split into grand strategy and wargame. Kinda like Total War only not that bad. They were on a right track by giving you indirect control over fighting via battleplans. This way I can still imagine being supreme commander: I can see what divisions perform badly, can decide we need air superiority so I tell factories, scientists and engineers to give me better stuff and chose where to send it. But I dread the idea that I'll have to switch from Paradox grand strategy to a Eastern Front grind. Haven't played the game, mind you, just saw videos. Guys say it's a better release than Stellaris and that gives me hope.

This was much more interesting than I've expected. I remembered Chess from the time I had any idea of strategic thinking. To me it looked like a game about attention, kinda like all those RTS games, but without speed requirement. Instead, I thought, you have to remember all those openings and counter-openings, predict which one your enemy uses and executing it noticing any necessary corretiongs. I never had enough concentration to be focused on not seeing direct consequences of my moves and you can't think about strategy when you don't have basics like this. This podcast made me try it again, with all those fancy chess.com analyze tools. My mind was blown. Analyze tool made me understand what's perhaps obvious to any third-grader who actually tried to play the game. It's a game with 2 winning conditions. Or, well, with 1 winning condition of Checkmate but with other being removing your enemy's ability to Checkmate, i.e. killing his units. The interplay between ability to check, defend your king from being checked, take enemy figures and save your ones opened to me. Thank you for this episode. I'm now going to watch all those chess videos. I probably won't play it on any serious level, I never can get persistent enough to become good at multiplayer, but I'm chess believer now. And yes, John's video are amazing. He's also good at constantly asking you to think about a situation through guiding questions. It's kind of surprising this behavior is not endorsed by your usual Video game letsplayers, it would work with most TBS, at least when you're working with replays or single player games.

Emptiness of big sandboxes is what bothering me a lot. It's a classic case of giving public what it wants. People ask for bigger maps, more guns, more enemies. The common solution is smart randomization pushed into a core of the game. Like DIablo having infinite number of weapons and monsters due to random modifiers. Or maybe Stellaris having infinite number of races once they put their shit together and make the game great. I remember warmly all those strategy games and RPGs that dropped the idea of being eternal. XCOM is clearly meant to be played once and only be replayed for difficulty, it's closer to classec RTS like WarCraft 3 in this regard. Shadowrun RPGs feel almost unique because of their linearity which was default playstyle way back. But those game manage to make every minute meaningful. There's a certain thrill in sandbox games that you can miss content so choices are more important. But in games like Skyrim you very rarely get cut off from any content, the only choice is to not visit places to get quests. In, say, Shadowrun Dragonfall I remember things that I've probably missed and pretty sure that few choices I made were meaningful. It never had magical feeling of living world that sandbox RPGs had but it also never had disenchantment of seeing how hollow and non-reactive the world is. Remember Gothic/Risen games? I think those have got the balance right. You had a dense - not big, dense - world to explore. You had a story and interconnected web of quests. You had hard choices between factions. Witcher is actually pretty similar to those games, only bigger, more bombastic and limited in gameplay - seriously, I'm tired of everyone ignoring the fact that actual fights in Witcher 3 are more repetitive and nonimaginative than freaking Assassins Creed, while Gothic/Risen had different weapon styles and magic schools for you to master.

They didn't find enough people still playing Endless Legend and promised it'll come later.

I think Age of Wonders 3 is much closer comparison, especially now that TW went fantasy. Only there you can play small limited scenarios if you wish so. TW games scare me off the minute it becomes obvious I have to micromanage the hell out of dozens of provinces, which becomes more tiresome with each iteration. Probably not with this one though. Previously they had short campaign mode that didn't break by the midgame, but it's absent since at least Rome 2. But yeah, no beautiful battles - and in TW Warhammer you can at last look at battle without cringe cause it no longer pretends it's historical.

Ah, total war again. Couldn't get into any of the games after Rome (just had 1 campaign in Empire. Most of it I autoresolved everything). While listening I had the same thought all the time "So why didn't they do it earlier?" TW pretended it has some connection with history even though it was basically a Hollywood version of it. So armies felt samey most of the time. And no fancy abilities, of course. This I can understand. But here it sounds like they understood they don't need complex economy and diplomacy and all this strategic fluff. They've limited it somewhat previously with limiting armies number and some other things but in Rome 2 they compensated it with endless busywork. I couldn't for the life of mine figure out why do I need all those agents stat and how can those general bonuses be so minimal while the choice was so obvious. Did they really focus on battles? Did they really made general progression fun? I still remember my great general from Rome 1 who gained traits like "Hates Carthago", "Mercenary Commander" and "Brilliant strategist" while fighting, then gaining homosexuality and decadence in Rome, then fighting Greeks and settling as an old governor of Crete. To hell with historicity, balance and player control - it was fun. I didn't even notice general changing in later Total War games except maybe Napoleon cause there were Napoleon and all the other guys. Hope they did it right this time.

To my knowledge no game went as far as Stellaris did in this direction. Stellaris has several things like this: ancient mining drones (you can read their transmissions to learn about planets with minerals or you can brake them in parts), travelling space amoebas (you can research them in various ways) and so on. Those are not just 1-time events, those are things you interact for a long period of time, probably into late-game. But that's it. We have only several things like that. You can react differently to them depending on your ethos but still you'll encounter drones and amoebas in every game. The game has mechanics to add Solaris or Q collective or Monoliths but those things you can't automatically generate. Also currently all those events have the same result depending on your reaction, you never wonder if attacking amoebas can have unpredicatble reprecussions.

First, significant part of early sci-fi concentrated on incomprehensible aliens. I'd say later there was a switch from humans being weak underdogs only capable of surviving at best to Star Trek style aliens being substitutes for Earth groups and concepts. There was Lovecraft with aliens you can't understand, even Wells Martians were inhuman and couldn't be talked to or reasoned with. there were more light-hearted yet still incomprehensible alien lives of, say, Sheckley ("The Absolute Weapon": scavengers get into some dead civilization rules and discover they've created lifeform that just consumes everything), Strugacky brothers (STALKER stuff or Ugly Swans) even though they had proper human-like aliens too. I'm not at all convinced we *need* really alien aliens but I don't like mushrooms and ants being not alien. I can understand various humanoids being ultra space Chinese or ultra space Nazis or ultra space Crusaders. With molluscs and floating gasbags my immersion is slightly broken. In future I'd want to see some special rules for different phenotypes both in domestic policies and diplomacy. MoO species were memorable cause they were complete in their stereotype. They each had distinctive look. Gnolams look like a small leprecaun and you know they probably love gold and don't like fighting. Their image is complete, they act as you'd expect and every feature of theirs work for their image. In Stellaris I've just rolled a random race. I got boars under military dictatorship, fanatic xenophiles and militarists under military dictatorship. They live on continental worlds, they are strong warriors and good engineers, they like wormhole travel and kinetics. It's not a bad idea for a race and I could see it becoming a memorable race for me, but I'll see 30 more random race in this galaxy and they'll all become a blur. This is why I'm actually experimenting with a tiny galaxy and minimum number of races now (8 I think) to see if it changes things to be more controllable and observable. Maybe theocratic pacifist mollusks would be more memorable if I don't have 6 more theocracies and 3 more mollusks in the galaxy.

I see a good justification for a relatively low score: previous Paradox titles were unique and you could look past problems to get an interesting experience. Victoria 2, Hearts of Iron 3 were almost broken on release. But after CK2 and EU4 relatively smooth launches the state of Stellaris - filled with UI, design and technical problems - looks like a return back to Paradox indie roots. Moreover, the game is not nearly as unique as previous titles. It's much more similar to Master of Orion and its numerous clones than to unique Paradox blend. Now it fights other similar games and with much more complete and polished games like Endless Space you can no longer claim it to be the messianic hardcore strategy as EU4 is often called.

Funny how you denouncing toxic commenters for conspiracy theories turned into conspiracy theory of 400 evil vocal assholes. Sympathise with Rowan. The score thing is just misleading, the review itself is full of hope for Stellaris. If I hadn't buy it beforehands it wouldn't stop me from buying it. Glad both he and Paradox reacted to the issue as grown ups.

Very unfortunate to see internet reacting to Rowan's review in the way it did. http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/05/09/stellaris-review Just read the comments. Comments are so disgusting Paradox had to intervene and say sane thing which was suddenly perceived as some messianic revelation.

TokyoDan, probably multiplayer wargames are the only ones that are not puzzles. Like Battle for Wesnoth - it's free, it's very simple, and it's definitely not a puzzle when you play it in MP.

They're doing exactly this in CK2 in the next patch so you can expect it to appear in EU4 soon. Also, every time Rowan asked why do all this stuff like expansion this had played in my head: