Khan Khomrad

Also 1:38:52

Haven't heard it yet but it seems that the very first 3MA Strikes back

Yes, and it unfortunately still hasn't been fixed.

I thought that that was a problem on my end. Apparently I was wrong. So, yeah, both this episode and the last one had some audio problems, which makes me wonder if someone isn't setting this up in order for Hermes, the audio magician, to make a triumphal comeback!

I can seem to access this page from the 3MA episode link. It says that I don't have permission to access the page, although following the link in the Idle Thumbs works fine (I'm here after all). Is anyone else having the problem or is it just me? Anyway, I've been curious to see what Bruce had to say about Pericles ever since he did a show on Churchill. Unfortunately I don't have friends that would be willing to buy boardgames and they are incredibly expensive here. That said, I do like these board games discussion very much. They are always informative about the historical period that the game is trying to represent and I also find it fascinating to hear about how boardgames work even though I'll probably never play it.

Sad that it's been a while since we last heard of Tom Chick and Julian Murdoch. It was good to see both Hermes and Bruce back. A very pleasant episode to listen to. Bruce's insight into boardgames always makes for an interesting discussion. Could we have a link for the PDF version of Hermes' bar graph or will we have to wait for him to publish that paper?

Question, what happened to Hermes? I believe this is the third episode in a row that he wasn't evolved in as a producer. There was a distinct lack of Troy's Goodfellow middle name joke. As someone who has played a lot of Anno 1404 & 2070 I found this discussion to be rather average. Some important aspects of the game that differentiate it from other entries in the series were glossed over (like workforce, industrialism and tourism). The Anno, at least since 1404, was always cartoonish and tongue in check. Every friendly character is always smiling and happy and every hostile character looks menacing and as if they were your superior. It also makes ample use of character tropes like the ilitarist mentioned. With that said, Anno's settings tend to inform what sort of social stuff that will be present and what the general narrative will be. Anno 1404 was very much about getting in contact with the Orient and scaffolding the construction of a western society and a middle eastern society side by side. Anno 2070, on the other hand, was very much a case of either having a Tycoon paradise or a Green heaven and both sides would eventually be able to house techies who were basically the promise of fixing nature by relying on technology. Pollution and energy consumption were important aspects of that game with each of the two main factions having to balanced its specific factions need for space, energy and how far they could push pollution and how well they could clean it. About the quests where you have to find people in the streets. That's been a stable of the series since Anno 14404, maybe even before that. I that was Rob said is more or less right. These quests were you have to go around looking for people serve as a way of spending time while recourse stockpile and having a closer look at your ant farm. And citizens did riot and burn down your buildings. The problem with citizens revolting is that you very, very rarely run in a situation where they will be angry to the point of harming your settlement. Anno games tend to run into the problem where you either have too much of any given resource or too few and in order for you to properly balance your resources you need to go into the wiki and look at how many citizens a single production chain can supply, how many of X resource buildings do you need for a given production chain to run at 100% efficiency or just use the fan made supply calculator. This aspect of the series isn't very noticeable in the first few citizen levels but when you get into the late game and building space starts running low efficiency is the name of the game. Lucky for Anno 1404 there's a excellent fan made patch which allows you to see all of this stuff in-game. All in all didn't really gave me a sense of how much and what has changed in Anno 1800 from the last installments, which may be a factor of the little prior contact that the panel had (except Troy) with the series. But, hey, I'm nonetheless happy that 3MA got to cover this series.

Never heard of that podcast before. Thx for the information. If anyone is interested on the episode, here is the link to it: https://www.spreaker.com/user/single_malt_strategy/single-malt-strategy-episode-34

A two hour episode? Looks promising! I'm very much happy to hear that 3 kingdoms is apparently a very good Total war game right out of the box after all of the problems they had with historical games in the last few years.

The episode link directs the listener to the Idlethumbs forum instead of this thread. I find it unfortunate how Troy won't be able to discuss the game. Would love to see his take on it. And poor Fraser wasn't able to be on it. Sad.

There we go. another Video game problem solved.

Oh, I see. Thx

Is the banner of this show an artwork from frostpunk?

A bit late there Troy. The show was released on a Tuesday and not on the weekend : p I remember way back when the panel discussing CIV VI hidden curriculum and how it thinks that History is a linear progression based on technological advancements. This is noteworthy when looking at the way that CIV VI and it's expansions approaches the subject of climate change. By what the panel described of Gathering Storm, it says that Climate Change happens as a consequence of Humans doing some action which harm the Planet, and that climate change can only be stopped by Humans. The only agent of change, be it positive or negative is Humanity. Nature is a passive agent that gets destroyed more and more as the game progresses and has no hope for repairing the damage done to it without human intervention. Rock Bands costing faith is a lovely commentary on the nature of religion and music itself and, as Troy said, makes wonder for the late game. About expansions, CIV VI got slammed early on for it's business model (to this day all of the pre-expansion DLC's have mixed or negative reviews on Steam). The fact that they didn't jumped ship and instead focused on delivering expansion packs more in line with the old retail expansions than what you'd expect from a DLC, to me, is very positive. I still hold hope that they'll remake Sid Meier Colonization--again--on CIV engine, just like they did as the last expansion for CIV IV (the third and last expansion I believe). By the way, CIV will make 30 in 2 years.

I remember dabbling on Rise and Fall: Civilizations at war. It was such a weird, weird game. In general, the campaign missions felt big and sprawling but the game always felt small and unfinished. The unit roster for each faction consisted of only a few units which only have your vanilla + stats upgrade. Boats were buggy (as you'd expect from naval combat :p) and the heroes were pretty much the same. The biggest difference between them was the melee weapon as I believe all of them had a bow for ranged attacks and, if memory serves me right, each had 2 abilities + a passive. This game and Seven Kingdoms are two "weird" RTS's that I still hold hope to see covered in this show someday.

I can only imagine how confusing this show must be for the listeners who never played a single Romance of the Three Kingdoms games or never payed much attention to this part of history. There are so many, many named characters to keep track of, many of which have pretty similar names and the names by itself are very much different than what we're used to listening in the West. I'd bet that this is the biggest challenge for someone trying to get into this part of Chinese History. I have only played Dynasty Warriors 6 back on the PS2 and I vividly remember Lu Bu's campaign where he was just fighting with everyone in search for a Worthy Opponent but none could match his might and, in the last mission, the Three Kingdoms combined forces to try and stop his rampage. An Epic conclusion to the game. Also, there's something to be said about the different evolutionary paths (for lack of a better word) that the Western strategy market and the Eastern market took. That can be seen in games like Nobunaga's Ambition (which the panel discussed some time ago), Dynasty Warriors Empire and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series.

I've been waiting for this episode ever since 3MA talked about Nobunaga's Ambition. I'm glad that you guys finally managed to put a panel together for this show

So far I've only played once as the Space Marines and got obliterated by the Necron AI at normal. A very pleasant surprised. The game reminded me a lot about Endless Legend when it comes to the city building and management aspect as well as the battle mechanics. I hoped for an overview of the other civilizations aside from the Tyranids, Space Marines and Necrons.

Another 2 hours episode? What a good way to begin 2019. I'm afraid that Michael may have forgotten to fill in the Troy " " Goodfellow this time.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this episode even if I've never seen these two movies. For the movie suggestion bit I would say that 300 and 300:Rise of an Empire could be used as a jumping point to talk about how they defined our understanding of the Greeks and Persians,in the same vein that Hollywood created a fictional Rome that many take for granted as if that's how it was in the times of the Romans. There's also Lawrence of Arabia from 1962. EDIT: why do some episodes of 3MA don't direct you to the discussion thread when you click the "Discuss this episode in the Idle Forums" but rather direct you to the forum page itself?

I was wondering when would be the next after dark episode. Guess I don't have to wait any longer. Also, is Michael slowly but surely becoming a elite irregular panelist? Who knows!? Maybe in 2019. I guess this ties up with what the panel said about Civ VI trying to be more about the human experience as a whole instead of just Big Expansionist Empires that control lots of land and are always at war. I do wonder if they ever thought about also having global cooling as a mechanic instead of just including global warning in an attempt to be Pro-environment. Also, I find it funny how Civ VI is releasing an expansion about the environment 4 months after cities:skylines released one about industries.

I hope we can get a show on Go some day. First the chess show, then Go and finally Bridge. 3MA is slowly breaking into mainstream strategy games About the panelists, that's a very interesting point that you raised. I find that my favorite episodes tends to be the ones where: Bruce talks about History, Video game & boardgame designs, Michael gets on the show to talk about management games (Never played one and probably won't) and Troy talks about history and the strategy games that no one remembers any more (walls of Rome anyone?). Guess I really like when the panel talks about game design and history (after dark and year in retrospect also tend to be good shows to me).

Welcome back 3MA! I must agree. This one felt very much like a throw back to the earlier episodes, which is good. It also made me realize how few episodes focused on city-builders were made that there may be an interesting conversation to be have about how the different games of this genre go about simulating a city. As Rob mentioned, the Anno series is basically a logistic-chain simulator. If you have to have enough production to supply the ever growing needs of your expanding pop, enough land to set up production chains and finally you need to have automated trade routes where your ships will sail from one island to the next taking and dropping cargo. This model is completely different from the Impressions city-builders, but they are both sell the fantasy of being a ruler of an expanding city/cities.

After 448 Three Moves Ahead episodes I can safely say that, to me, this was the one who strayed away the most from the topic at hand and video games in general. That said, it made me thing about the different storytelling and cultural elements that we take for granted in our media in general and what changes, if any, the localizers (I think this is the term for Video game translators in english, but I could b wrong :P) made when translating the game from Japanese to English. Listening to this episode made me even more interested in giving this series a chance. I find the combat system and the narrative very different from the other tactics game that we see nowadays. Still hoping that some day the panel will be able to talk about Mordheim and how they took some aspects of VC.

Good question. The Dominions games tend to shine in multiplayer where you have to make good use of planning before the game even starts, diplomacy to not get killed and micromanagement before battle in order to get the best out of your units, nameless or otherwise. Add to that the ability to use the in-game Lore as a foundation block for your own narrative and I think you are onto something here. We need the original panel to bring back Dominions in to the 3MA conversations