04048

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Posts posted by 04048

  1. Posted

    Definitely wasted a chunk of my free time in middle school with the original Battlezone. I'm personally surprised that more games didn't steal that interface, although Sacrifice clearly had the best go with that type of strategy-shooter. 

    I found Battlezone to be charmingly breakable - you could traverse much rougher terrain than the wingmates you created, so I'd sometimes just stage solo flank attacks from behind their power generators. Is that still possible in the remaster?

  2. Posted

    Loved this episode! 

    I don't usually play games that are so heartstring-yanking, but I liked the discussion about the tension between what the game says in its narrative vs. its mechanics. That was very insightful and productive. 

    Hoping this discussion thread will have some "trolley-car problem" jokes

  6. Posted

    On 8/24/2017 at 11:11 PM, Marchettus said:

    I enjoyed the episode but I feel like it didn't have the focus of some other shows about "topics".  I like that the pod takes time to look at the landscape from time to time on how genres have changed.

     

    One huge miss was not talking about tropico 2 in more depth.  When I play rimworld I feel that tropico 2 has a huge influence on the game.  You could only get workers by raiding ships, pirates couldn't do any work and were prone to mood swings.  

     

    I really think that it is a game that deserves a remake since it was such an experimental concept.  It's worth playing for an afternoon to see how broken it is and how it's an interesting path not taken.

    Tropico 2 is definitely the odd game out of the series, given the different period and mechanics. Good point!

     

    Pirates are usually pretty awesome, though. 

     

    Honestly, survival strategy could probably be its own podcast, given the popularity of survival mechanics. 

     

    Also, there goes the 85 hours I spent on Dungeon of the Endless when I was doing archaeological fieldwork and living out of a motel room with only my laptop. 

  8. Posted

    On 4/26/2017 at 3:06 PM, riadsala said:

    I never said it wasn't, or shouldn't be. I just said I was wondering what systems people thought were more accurate reflections of how we think things worked.

    That I don't know, and I was being a snarky doofus in my last post. Apologies if any offense was taken. 

     

    Back on topic, I think that a lot of games don't really get into how effective mass arrow-fire can be after the history of roleplaying games nerfing ranged weapons.

    After all, having melee troops is pointless if you don't have a way to get the into melee before being killed by projectiles. 

    Perhaps the fire-arrows in M2TW are overpowered and weren't as historically-important as they are in the game, but their overpowered nature probably derives in part from the player's inability to tell their shield-carrying troops to "hold their damn shields over their damn heads" while advancing under fire.  

  10. Posted

    On 4/10/2017 at 6:53 AM, riadsala said:

    Good episode.

     

    One thing I would be interested in is a discussion of how realistic the battle model is. Obviously, no fun/commercial game is going to be all that realistic, but what do we think of M2TW? I ask, as I've recently returned to the old King Arthur game which is quite similar to M2TW in many ways. An interesting quirk of that game is that archers appear to be incredibly powerful, so much so that there is a toggle in the games options to weaken them. It got me thinking about these things should be balanced.

     

     

    Of course archery is powerful, why else would England put so much effort to mandating longbow practice?

  11. Posted

    On 12/18/2016 at 10:11 AM, Jerry59 said:

    I was really disappointed that Bruce kept putting a damper on the discussion by pointing out "that wouldn't sell" or "that would be too hard to research".  The discussion was about "underrepresented theaters and conflicts", not whether games on them would be difficult to research or sell.  

    Meh. It's Bruce's on the podcast to be contrariness, I think. That's part of being Bruce.

  15. Posted

    Listening to Ep#274 (mail call) and Rob's fond reminiscing of Sacrifice, I was reminded of another similar game of that mold. I got a copy of Battlezone with the Gateway PC I had as a kid (along with some non-strategy games) and played the heck of it. 

     

    Admittedly, the orders interface wasn't great, as it relied on moving from the WASD to the number keys, but trying to shoot and command at the same time was rarely a good idea in-game anyway. The setting was also pretty ridiculous, but it does make me wonder why there haven't been that many similar games, or ones that used a similar interface...

    post-35449-0-54498100-1445192863_thumb.jpg

  16. Posted

    Civilization V's elimination of unit stacks was a big deal when 1st announced, and now has people asking developers of 4x & TBS games whether they are going to have "stacks of doom" in their games or not. 

     

    I just got this idea while falling asleep last night. A potential solution to "stacks of doom": pincer attacks.

    If a stack is attacked in the same turn (or simultaneously, depending on the game design) from more than one direction, it receives a penalty relative to the #/positioning of attackers, as well as the size of the stack. 

    This represents the difficulty of arraying a large army, with its greater reliance on baggage trains and camp followers, against harassing tactics. The alternative is not stacking (putting army in a column). 

     

    Thoughts? This just came to me. 

  20. Posted

    1st post!

     

    I was wondering if anyone remembered what episode they talk about the Rabbitcon Revolutionary War-era groundhog day scenario, as well as who ran it?

    Just listing the episode # would be enough, although a discussion about the use of Groundhog Day method as a way to teach games or military history is also a good idea.