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Rob Zacny

Episode 313: Listener Mail

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Rob, Bruce, and Troy "They Call Me Pony Express" Goodfellow attack the mailbox. We asked 3MA listeners for questions and got them in spades, so tune in to find out the panel's favorite games, podcasts, and desert island picks.

 

Listen here.

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Great episode. 

 

Very interesting discussion about tactical battles in 4X games. Reminded me of the following. I have a friend you'd call non-gamer. He likes WW2 so sometimes he plays historical strategies about it. When we were kid he played games everybody played like GTA3 or Morrowind. Sometimes I show him something new and hip. Like Witcher 2 - showed it mainly for the graphics. My friend looks at several minutes of gameplay and cinematographic dialog. Then he points at some character and asks "Can you kill him"?

 

Killing everybody in RPG or open-world game is one of those features people think they want. It's a feature that gives you limitless possibilities. Gives you a promise of something bigger. The game gives you weapons and says you can kill monsters. What if I try to use this thing you call weapon on civilians? If the game says you can't that you know you don't have a real weapon or real control over your character.

 

In the same veijn in a grand strategy you have armies and plots of land that are not  everything that was just a number and small tile of land transforms into standing armies on complex terrain. Now you know that those people and those lands really exist. In Rome Total War they had feature showing your city in 3D the same as it would look in siege battle. It served no purpose but the guy who added it understood that people needed that. It made cities real places - just like similar feature in Civilization 1-3. People need this zoom in to believe in those worlds. Even if battles are not that important world jut becomes real. Even if I think tactical battles are bad idea I understand psychological factors that made people want it.

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Wrt Sid Meier's maxims discussion, I think the cast misunderstood or sidestepped the question. The CK2 discussion was about AI characters doing cool things, and the player just reading about said coolness. And the poster (it seemed to me) suggested that the AI is not an opponent in the game, merely one of the subsystem. The real opponent is the system as a whole. And the question was, should strategy games embrace this asymmetry, instead of providing opponents that have only the same verbs as the player.

I've been thinking about the sane thing myself. Endless Legend did a bit of it, AI War kind of as well. And I would include Dwarf Fortress as well, although it is almost a pure simulation. All games I quite enjoyed. I think it is harder to make such systems be rewarding and it is harder to learn such games, for the player. But I do want more of them.

Also, Bruce's quip made me want to play Sid Meier's Circus Maximus, a gladiator arena management game.

Edit: Oh man, that's what you get for being sleepy. Circus Maximus was the one famed for the races, wasn't it? Ludi management sim sounds almost better though. Theme Ludi.

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Well said unimural.  I personally prefer asymmetry when it comes to single player, but it should speak the same verb as the player, if that makes sense.  The list you put together are pretty good examples of what I had in mind, but probably more than what Endless Legend did, but not to the point where the AI is spawning stuff out of the nether, etc.

 

This is part of the reason why Paradox games are so strong, is that AI plays by the rule (I mean they do cheat but cheating is still done within the rules, just that they get more resources, etc.) but then they ignore the meta rule that player goes by and commits to different rule - role playing their roles as historical entity.  So the asymmetry is created but the game still speaks the same verbs regarding the technical details, just that AI doesn't care for world domination or some other abstract goal... it's just trying to behave moment by moment in a way that it's historical counterpart would have liked to do.

 

What a good question.  So glad that you wanted to clarify it unimural.  Such interesting topic.

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Nah, what Sid Meier was talking about is more of programmer having more fun than player.

 

 

You can write interesting game with complex calculations and deep systems. You look at your code and systems and you're euphoric cause look at all those great algorithms. In reality it's mostly about inderect control games and arkane systems player is not supposed to understand. Like Distant Worlds. Or Victoria 2 economy: you will never understand how it works and why stuff happens but it's part of the messagee about V2 era. 

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I listened to this a day or so ago so my memory may be wrong but I think it was Rob who said someone should do a kickstarter for an update for Peter Turcan's Waterloo game. I'll second that motion and chuck some money its way if it happens. I think Waterloo must have been the very first strategy game I played on computer - it certainly came out a couple of years earlier than Dune 2 which is the other early memory I have for such games. I've still got it on a 3.5" floppy disk along with a laminated map and manual (those were the days) and I was still able to play it on XP while I had that installed. The text entry command system was pretty intuitive - though you did need either an encyclopaedic knowledge of the battle or the map and OOB from the manual - so the main challenges were timing and chaos. The former because your orders went out via little stick figure horsemen who had to chase down the commander the order was intended for so you had to know where said commander was and how long the courier would take to get there if you wanted to co-ordinate an attack. And chaos because couriers could get delayed by being caught up in routing troops and the like - maybe even killed, not quite sure on that - and commanders would react to local events so might not be where you expect them. Hitting the end turn button and waiting to see how things had played out - it worked in 15 minute segments - was always suspenseful. Rob was right in lamenting that nobody - apart from Turcan himself who did Austerlitz and the Spanish Armada on the same lines - followed up this way of doing the command and control. More powerful PCs allowed real time graphics and after the aforementioned Dune 2 it was pretty much point and click all the way.

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About command modes, while in a very simple form, Mount & Blade kind feature one - in the game you did control a single character but you could issue a few set of order to your party, while still instantaneous, because of the game immersion if did was a lot of fun, since you had to ride around, see where the enemy is coming, finding a good ground to maybe attack or defend.

 

Also I did felt the same as Rob about Empire, because it was also one of the Total War game that I most played (121 hours, against 250 hour for Shogun 2).

 

Talking about the Chick Parabola, I could not avoid to remember about Daggerfall (Elder Scrolls Chapter 2). Because, back there when the game was released, it was quite impressive in terms of scale and depth, however as you might start to master it, you could see its cracks (what did or did not work, how bizarre some systems where), but it would ruin it? I think, there, and this works for other games too, depend of much on each person expectations, the actual "revelation", for some might still not mean much (I did kept played Daggerfall for a very long time, even after I figured that a lot of things didn´t work, same with Empire), but maybe if became a turning point for other (when I started to figure out MOO3, It did ruin for me very fast).

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Nah, what Sid Meier was talking about is more of programmer having more fun than player.

 

 

You can write interesting game with complex calculations and deep systems. You look at your code and systems and you're euphoric cause look at all those great algorithms. In reality it's mostly about inderect control games and arkane systems player is not supposed to understand. Like Distant Worlds. Or Victoria 2 economy: you will never understand how it works and why stuff happens but it's part of the messagee about V2 era. 

 

Yep, that's how his quote was always presented to me. It was him talking to someone designing a game and asking "who's having fun, the developer or the player?" If a system was an amazing technical achievement but not interesting or well presented, the apocrypha is he would ask that to get a designer to reevaluate the relevance and intent of a design decision, rather than suggesting the "opponent" was having a better time than the player.

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Nah, what Sid Meier was talking about is more of programmer having more fun than player.

 

 

You can write interesting game with complex calculations and deep systems. You look at your code and systems and you're euphoric cause look at all those great algorithms. In reality it's mostly about inderect control games and arkane systems player is not supposed to understand. Like Distant Worlds. Or Victoria 2 economy: you will never understand how it works and why stuff happens but it's part of the messagee about V2 era.

Yes, but I thought the question that was asked wasn't really about that, and I really think it was an interesting question. But perhaps I'm just projecting my own thoughts.

Perhaps my initial interpretation of the significance of the role AI as either an opponent or part of the system is flawed. All the games that I mentioned are great at creating stories. But that same applies to Civ as well. Perhaps the important ingredient is marrying the theme with the gameplay. Still, I would love to see something like the Left 4 Dead AI director for a 4X type game.

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I want to thank you guys for picking my question.  Your answers were fantastic.  You are the man, Bruce!  Not just for the great answer to my question, but also for listening to the Hardcore History podcast.  His WWI series was A++.

 

The whole show was great.  

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If you like historical podcasts, have you listened to "The History of Rome"?  An epic and well-read account of the Roman Empire from beginning to end. Well worth a listen.  

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