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Rob Zacny

Episode 325: Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence

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Three Moves Ahead 325:

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Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence

Rob, Gaslamp Developer Nicholas Vining, and Troy "Notice me, senpai" Goodfellow sit down to talk about Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence. Koei has a long history of strategy games that dates back to console gaming with Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Their most recent offering, Sphere of Influence, is newly available on Steam. It's a beautiful game, but is it good? Is interesting better than good?

Nobunaga's Ambition, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dwarf Fortress, Crusader Kings II

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YESssssssssssss will update this post once I listent to it~~~

 

What a great podcast.  Not much I can say ATM cause lot of my impressions are largely reflected on it except where I grew up, the story of Romance of the Three Kingdoms is like so culturally beloved that Koei's series are not too culturally foreign to me but that's about it.

 

Oh yeah one thing I wanted to mention about the AI... recently while playing MGSV I kinda wondered... I don't think it's actually all that important that AI 'plays the game' with you.  I think what's more important measure is that AI presents itself as functional entity that is highly predictable within the game world.

 

By that I mean, AI should be interactable to a degree given by the game's scope and theme.  Like take MGSV for example.  You as the player does all the sneaking in the game and have drastically more tools at your disposal... but mechanically I thought AI in that game was so fun because how much the AI 'functions'.  You can interact with it in so many ways within the scope of the game... and primarily, the ways in which you can distract it is very very very fun.

 

Same with EU4.  AI in that game actually doesn't play the same game as veteran player because it is bound by its 'personality'.  Yet it is pretty predictable and you can push and pull at it using diplomacy very reliably, which results in very very very fun game.

 

That's what I think betrayal mechanics in Nobunaga's Ambition (or any other games of this sort) needs as well.  It has to be forseeable, just not preventable (without it becoming a huge resource dump, MAYBE).  Betrayal as a surprise element could be achieved through complex interacting system (something that is foreseeable with skill), but it should never just jump out at the player from mechanically untouchable fog of war IMO unless the game is built to be simple to incorporate some heavy reliance on dice rolling and let the player know that unpredictability (kinda tricky theme to sell for a STRATEGY genre I think, where planning is so critical).

 

TLDR: AI should be predictably manipulable first and foremost.

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Been mulling back and forth if I should buy this, I see it every day at work. Glad I can give this a listen and better picture of it.

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To be accurate, there are generally considered to be four "great" novels of pre-modern Chinese literature: Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms from the fourteenth century, Journey to the East from the sixteenth, and Dream of the Red Chamber from the eighteenth. I sympathize with Troy having difficulty finishing Romance of the Three Kingdoms: when I read it this past spring, I found the first two thirds entertaining, if somewhat dense, but then the last third, which played out after all the principal characters of the epic were dead, really tried my investment in what was going on. It certainly doesn't help that the opening lines "spoil" the ending: "Long divided, the empire must unite: long united, it must divide."

 

Dream of the Red Chamber is maybe the finest work of fiction that I've ever read, but I can't imagine a Koei game about the daily activities and small deceptions of a crumbling aristocratic household...

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Romance of the Three Kingdoms have few TV drama/manga/comic/anime variations that are all... varying degree of good.  My personal favorite is probably this 1994 TV series made in China.  If you can find english sub of it please try it, much more digestable format but of course, incredibly time consuming but I think it's totally worth it.

 

I think it was this one

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms_(TV_series)

 

Edit: oh yeah, the end really fizzles out cause like you said, the really legendary characters die long before that.

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Dear god, how on earth does one point the finger at Minecraft for promulgating "the wiki is part of the game" in one breath, and then turn around and congratulate oneself for loving Dwarf Fortress in the next?

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I used to play tons of Koei games and I am forever grateful that it ignites my interest in history.

Their games have such diverse background. Many might not necessarily be strategically deep but it sure as heck bring the era to life.

 

Playing as Napoleon in L'Empereur. Rising from leading your motley crew of revolutionaries to eventually be the emperor of Europe.

Uncharted Water. Play as female spanish pirate, italian explorer, british explorer or other characters and get the whole world to explore and plunder in the age of discovery.

Balor of the Evil Eye where you play as a celtic tribe trying to unite Eire and finally get rid of the Fomorian Giants.

Bandit Kings of Ancient China. Grow your own band of bandits while placating the powerful prime minister until you are powerful enough to topple him.

 

Of course my favorites are still the RotK and Nobunaga series since the modern versions actually get ported to PC (and translated to english)

 

It'd be great to see Paradox or CA tackle some of these less downtrodden settings.

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Gaizokubanou, it's an old idea.

. Basically the idea is you either write human substitute AI or "fun" AI which doesn't actually plays to win. You need first for "sport" games like chess or maybe fighting games. You want second for cases when you sell an experience or winning AI is impossible anyway. And in some games AI is obvious script that is not supposed to be anywhere as smart as real opponent. Like Tower Defense games.

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Gaizokubanou, it's an old idea.

. Basically the idea is you either write human substitute AI or "fun" AI which doesn't actually plays to win. You need first for "sport" games like chess or maybe fighting games. You want second for cases when you sell an experience or winning AI is impossible anyway. And in some games AI is obvious script that is not supposed to be anywhere as smart as real opponent. Like Tower Defense games.

 

Yep, I didn't catch that particular video but have read on Soren's other writings on it and I agree it's an old idea.

 

Extremely pedantic so putting it under spoilers...

 

So it is nothing new, but strategy genre seem to have hard time adopting it, as most strategy games' singleplayer mode continues to adopt the method of having the AI factions exist in same plane as the human one, and whenever AI is exploited it's considered as bad because it is exploited, while the problem is more likely that it is exploitable in linear fashion.

 

As you mentioned, TD is a genre that clearly embraces the idea of manipulable opponent as the AI is meant to be clearly readable and its behaviors (mainly the pathing) malleable by the player.

 

So it's not just that AI should be dumb... I think AI should always play a different game with different ruleset for foreseeable future because playing sports with the AI seems like a bad design for singleplayer games.  But this too isn't really new either (I'm pretty sure Soren at the very least mentioned such possible thought).

 

So with that in mind, I don't think problem with Nobunaga is that AI isn't playing the same game as the player... it's just not very malleable.  By that I mean every time you poke and prod at the AI, it should have predictable but diverse set of response that you can then rely on to exploit it, but those shouldn't be the same game rule that player relies on.  It should be similar to be sure (by that I mean it wouldn't make sense for AI to operate on say, driving sim game rule) but only so that it makes thematic sense.

 

EU4 is interesting example because on one level AIs are playing the same game as the player (as far as armies and economy goes) but the most critical aspect of the game, diplomacy, is where it exists purely to be manipulated by the player and that's why I think the game is as fun as it is.  That's the sort of thing Nobunaga needs, not for the AI to use same tools as the player, but to predictably react to player action in ways that could be exploited upon.

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Great show!

 

On the subject if the AI is begin active or not, because I too wonder about that too, however - the AI does act, but I wonder how much is affected by either difficult level and something which I suspect, but I have no way to prove, that the AI will give priority to do Historial Quests. In my current game, with a higher difficult I did noticed the following things happen:

 

- AI Imagawa managed to beat up Oda, which only dis a few it is historical quests before it got defeated. However, the AI did recruit several ex Oda officers.

- Sometimes during the report your advisors tell you when a officer with lower loyalty might be meeting with someone else (which might mean that the AI does use espionage).

- Mori and another clan did some large expansion.

- During larger battle the AI does pull some tricks, I noticed they using special powers a lot. In my largest battle so far in another game as Uesugi against Hojo, I noticed that the AI did use its smaller armies to move behind or around me, specially one small army lead by Kotaro Fuma, which kept using the Phantom Army ability, which force the affected general to change focus and by doing this it did manged to move away one of my armies which was trying to flank the Hojo main force.

- I did noticed tha the AI react soon as you move your armies around, in one case, I was moving my armies to attack another smaller clan, the neighbor clan however which likely had eyes in this clan too, quickly move to take them down before me. In fact this kind of behavior solve the old "I move my armies to your borders before you can react" that often happen in many strategy games.

One nice thing that  most of time you might miss and where the interface don´t help much is that a army, aside from the general will also have other officers of that same castle around, each officer can bring their special skill to that army. This can turn the table a lot in tougher situation, more than once, I did avoid huge casualities thanks to the wife or daughter of someone which was around that army and used their abilities. However, is a bit trick to find to find where in the interface you do that, this might be the reason why in a lot of times in the game tutorial you can fail that battle because you can´t quickly find where you click to use the Release ability (which all armies have once muskets are around).

 

Among one thing which I would like see more developers using is how the game present events and characters and how it develop them, its very evocative and thematic and very taiga drama like. And while the execution is very simple, following a almost visual novel model, thanks to the art and execution does the job very well and it would be something not hard to do.

 

Now talking other games based in chinese classic works, Margin Water also got a game based on it: a very good jrpg (at least the first 2 games), called Suikoden, that also got some strategy elements in form of large scale battles that happen in the plot.

 

Troy wished for a new Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and well - http://operationrainfall.com/2015/09/01/koei-tecmos-tgs-2015-lineup/ there is a Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII is in the list, list for ps4, ps3 and pc but no word confirming coming to the west so far, but maybe we might have some luck.

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gave up on reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms after about 50 pages. I did better with the Water Margin, read the first half (or volume in the printing i had).

 

Unsure on this one, £45 (yes real english monies) is a lot for a game, only MSGV and Command ModAir warfare are at that price and interest me, and I will buy both of those before this. But.. the promise of a strategy game that rewards the decisive battle is a huge draw. Historical stories, the good ones, often boil down to the one big gambit i hate that in total war i have to rinse and repeat the same battle for 10 different armies for every city i take.

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By that I mean, AI should be interactable to a degree given by the game's scope and theme.  Like take MGSV for example.  You as the player does all the sneaking in the game and have drastically more tools at your disposal... but mechanically I thought AI in that game was so fun because how much the AI 'functions'.  You can interact with it in so many ways within the scope of the game... and primarily, the ways in which you can distract it is very very very fun.

 

 

 

Gaizokubanou, it's an old idea.

. Basically the idea is you either write human substitute AI or "fun" AI which doesn't actually plays to win. You need first for "sport" games like chess or maybe fighting games. You want second for cases when you sell an experience or winning AI is impossible anyway. And in some games AI is obvious script that is not supposed to be anywhere as smart as real opponent. Like Tower Defense games.

 

 

Good posts on this idea.  I really think MGSV is a great example where the AI really stood out to me.    I found it very fun to manipulate.  For example, putting the enemy in an alert for me made them predictible.  They would often stay put.  So you could snipe a couple and then sneak down on top of them.  Or if you're around buildings, you shoot a loud weapon on one side and circle around where you know they will go.

 

For me, over time you figured out the AI but that just made it more fun.  Eventually armor and some things limit your options but mostly you have a lot of freedom and a lot of those options work really well.

I personally like the idea of this kind of AI in strategy games.

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 I did noticd that the AI react soon as you move your armies around, in one case, I was moving my armies to attack another smaller clan, the neighbor clan however which likely had eyes in this clan too, quickly move to take them down before me. In fact this kind of behavior solve the old "I move my armies to your borders before you can react" that often happen in many strategy games.

 

Oh man, I wish we'd brought that up. I do love that all the clan exist in a state of cold war and will react to army deployments by moving forces onto the border. Great point, and something that I badly wish I saw in more strategy games. A better solution than the weak-kneed diplomatic "please move your armies away from my border" option.

 

Also, enjoying how this thread is 2/3 "so you can't make it through RotTK..."

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Oh man, I wish we'd brought that up. I do love that all the clan exist in a state of cold war and will react to army deployments by moving forces onto the border. Great point, and something that I badly wish I saw in more strategy games. A better solution than the weak-kneed diplomatic "please move your armies away from my border" option.

 

Also, enjoying how this thread is 2/3 "so you can't make it through RotTK..."

 

!!! that's such a good feature can't believe I didn't praise it in ranty fashion...

 

And about the latter, well when the story involves things like Xiahou Dun getting shot in the eye by arrow only to pull it out and eat it because he didn't want to throw anything his mother gave him away, then proceed to kill the guy who shot him in the eye... well you just gotta let others know how to read such epic tale.

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Never even heard of this game before - a prime example of why this is one of the best podcasts on the internet.

 

I'd love to see episodes on the Cities Skylines expansion, Satellite Reign, Xenonauts (just in case you're short of ideas!)

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(just in case you're short of ideas!)

 

Ahahahaahahaha. I kid you not, the list of games we want to look at — just games, mind you, not topics — is a single-spaced page long. And all of those are on it! Who knows, maybe after a good 18 months of the best intentions, we'll finally do Xenonauts!

 

The "pile of shame" gets daunting fast when you're a strategy games podcast.

 

There are not enough weeks in the year.

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We just need people not to make any strategy games for a couple of years and 3MA will be fine.

Oh for the halcyon days of 2009 when this sometimes seemed like a clear and present danger.

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I do plan to read the RoTK book sometime, just have to figure out if there is a better or recommend translation/version something which I have no idea. By the way, I would really recommend check out the podcast which SamS posted above, it is very good.

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Ahahahaahahaha. I kid you not, the list of games we want to look at — just games, mind you, not topics — is a single-spaced page long. And all of those are on it! Who knows, maybe after a good 18 months of the best intentions, we'll finally do Xenonauts!

 

The "pile of shame" gets daunting fast when you're a strategy games podcast.

 

There are not enough weeks in the year.

 

I believe an elegant solution would be to make the podcast a daily occurrence 

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I believe an elegant solution would be to make the podcast a daily occurrence 

 

The Ludovico Technique could be adapted to suit our needs.

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This is free this weekend so I've been playing a little. I was thinking when playing that I really wanted was for Koei to put out a new RoTK game. 

 

Lo and behold, Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII is being released on 10 December 2015.

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