Rob Zacny

Episode 333: Prison Architect

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Three Moves Ahead 333:

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Prison Architect

Rob Zacny and special guest Paul Dean talk about Prison Architect, a game that has recently been released yet seemingly been around forever. Rob and Paul are both quite keen on the game and its sense of humor, satire, and good old fashioned ant-farminess.

Prison Architect

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A great episode with my favorite board game reviewer as guest! I think the point about the relationship between inmates and staff is a good one. While I can live without managing staff schedules, I think some of the most interesting drama in prisons comes from the attitude of guards towards prisoners and vice versa.

 

Recently I've started my first all max-security prison, and as tends to happen due to budget restrictions, I had my guards spread thin. Inevitably a fight broke out, and one guard immediately stepped in to end it. Unfortunately backup was just a little too far away and he got stabbed with garden shears and died only seconds before help reached him.

 

I knew that all I had to do was hire a few more guards to have better coverage to prevent this kind of problem, but for roleplaying reasons I took it on myself to research body armor and buy stab vests for all my guards, as well as install metal detectors. How could my staff continue working if I didn't take serious steps to improve safety? I imagined my guards absolutely detesting this now-murderer and harassing him at every opportunity. Too bad the game mechanics don't reflect this at all. Maybe in a future update?

 

I agree with Paul though, this game is amazing for all the detail it does include. And that feeling of always keeping one eye on the budget is spot on, both necessary and a bit disturbing upon reflection.

 

You guys didn't mention the Intelligence screen and confidential informants at all (maybe you haven't messed with them much?), but I find it's a critical tool to understanding your prisoners by discovering their hidden reputations.You'll have some deaths on your hands if you don't find out who's a Snitch or Ex-Law Enforcement soon enough, or who's Extremely Volatile. Apparently tapping phones is another way to learn reputations.

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Recently I've started my first all max-security prison, and as tends to happen due to budget restrictions, I had my guards spread thin. Inevitably a fight broke out, and one guard immediately stepped in to end it. Unfortunately backup was just a little too far away and he got stabbed with garden shears and died only seconds before help reached him.

 

I knew that all I had to do was hire a few more guards to have better coverage to prevent this kind of problem, but for roleplaying reasons I took it on myself to research body armor and buy stab vests for all my guards, as well as install metal detectors. How could my staff continue working if I didn't take serious steps to improve safety? I imagined my guards absolutely detesting this now-murderer and harassing him at every opportunity. Too bad the game mechanics don't reflect this at all. Maybe in a future update?

 

Yeah, see, that's kind of the thing I want, too. Staff being "tired" isn't really an interesting issue, more just a warning sign that you're overstretched or lacking in amenities. Easy solutions in both cases. But the kind of thing you're talking about, where guards are going to be going to work every day alongside a convict who killed on of their own... that's is rife with unused potential here.

ON THE OTHER HAND... my fears that the game could get kind of sadistic? I suspect getting into a lot of guard-prisoner dynamics might be one way that could happen. The moment we're watching guards beat a prisoner and marveling because, "hey, cool, that guard is working out a grudge" then we're back to the things that made me a little wary of this entire idea.

 

Didn't do enough with the the espionage mechanics. My snitches tended to get stitches (and by stitches, I mean brutal and fatal stabbings). So I just tended to rely on direct observation and searches.

 

Oh, no idea if this is real or not, but I sometimes I'd send guards into cell blocks late at night and i'd spot a prisoner scrambling back into this bed the moment the guard came down the corridor and look like he was asleep. In most cases where I saw this happen, a search revealed contraband. So I started watching prisoners myself for "suspicious behavior". Maybe I was just projecting and interpreting search results through the lens of confirmation bias, but it did seem like I could spot the outliers in the prison population and suppress them.

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ON THE OTHER HAND... my fears that the game could get kind of sadistic? I suspect getting into a lot of guard-prisoner dynamics might be one way that could happen. The moment we're watching guards beat a prisoner and marveling because, "hey, cool, that guard is working out a grudge" then we're back to the things that made me a little wary of this entire idea.

 

This is what's kept me away from the game; I'm usually purely about mechanics, but... some small part of my brain says "the line between that and Concentration Camp Architect looks mighty blurry...".

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This is what's kept me away from the game; I'm usually purely about mechanics, but... some small part of my brain says "the line between that and Concentration Camp Architect looks mighty blurry...".

I honestly wish there was a bit more of that, even so. The often-criticized absence (or rather, whitewashing) of racial tensions contributing to the problems of the prison-industrial complex would benefit, especially. Imagine the difficulty of hiring non-bigoted guards and trying to rotate shifts to keep a guard's grudge from blossoming into full-blown racism, maybe even to the point of helping prisoners of a certain race dodge harsher punishments... Tough, but interesting, I'd think.

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Hi, 

This is the first time I've listened to a 3MA episode (I normally listen to Idle Thumbs and just figured out that for some reason the Idle Thumbs Networks RSS feed seems to update several hours before the Idle Thumbs Show RSS does).  Anyway, saw this episode and since I play / backed the game, I though I'd give it a listen.

 

First, that was a really good discussion, and I'll likely listen to more 3MA in the future.

 

However, I'm surprised that with over an hour spent talking about Prison Architect, there wasn't a single mention of Dwarf Fortress. If you've ever played Dwarf Fortress, you will instantly recognize that many parts of Prison Architect was inspired by it.  Please excuse me if Dwarf Fortress has been discussed on the podcast previously.

 

 

Dwarf Fortress, for anyone who has never played it, is a Sim / City Management game, were you are tasked with taking 7 Dwarves (yes, 7) and setting out to set up a new settlement / fortress somewhere in the wilderness of your randomly generated world.  You start by setting up the attributes of your dwarves, and allocating supplies (your one wagon can only hold so much), and then setting off to your carefully (or not so carefully) chosen location.  You will want a location that has some trees on the surface for wood, and a stream or other water source, and a good metals in the ground like iron and flux stone that you can use to turn the iron into steal but which doesn't have wet soil (an aquifer) which is difficult to dig through.

 

You arrive in spring and you need to have at least the basics set up by winter, or your dwarves will likely die.  You need to plant crops, setup some basic workshops for wood working, stone working, and craft making, and build some basic sleeping quarters and areas to store things.  You can designate where to build things, but you don't directly control which dwarf will do each job.  Any dwarf with the proper skill for doing a job may do it, however, 1/2 way through, they may decide that they are hungry, or thirsty or tired, and will wander off to take care of those needs (or may just fall asleep of the floor if you don't have beds yet).

 

You dig into the land / mountain, and carve out some basic rooms using your miners. Your stone workers take the stone from the miners, and make tables and thrones (chairs) and doors from them.  You get a carpenter chopping trees and making beds. You get a farmer or two working on the surface or in mud lined rooms growing plants outside or edible mushrooms underground. You brew some of the plants into alcohol.  A craft worker is busy making simple crafts that you will trade to a supply caravan in the fall for supplies you need to survive the winter.  The caravan comes and goes and hopefully you have enough to survive the winter.  However, the caravan also brings news of your progress to the outside world, and you get more immigrants in the spring.

 

The next year you build more rooms for the immigrants.  You set up some cattle in pens and start raising meat.  You send a dwarf to the river to fish.  You set up a forge, and start turning some of the ore you dig up into useful items.  You get a report that the fisherdwarf was scared off by a bear.  So you set up a few dwarfs with some simple weapons from the forge and have then take care of the bear.  You get a report that you miners have found a big underground cave. Another caravan comes and goes, and more immigrants arrive.

 

The next year you get report of strange creatures in the caves.  A caravan from the Elves arrives but leaves angry that you attempted to trade them the desecrated corpse of trees.  Goblins show up and attack your fortress, however, you luckily have installed some traps that happened to take out their leader, and the rest scramble away.  A dwarf gets a strange mood, takes over a workshop and demands mysterious ingredients for their 'masterpiece'.  An axedwarf grows attached to his iron axe and names it, and refuses to pick up a better steal one.  The goblins attack again, and this time there are twice as many.  A baron decides to move in to your fortress, and starts making demands to build certain items, and forbid the trading of certain other items.  Just then, a dragon, a colossus, or a forgotten beast from the dawn of the world attacks!

 

 

The game is actually really impressive, and also strangely backwards and hard to play.  The game generates a world for you, and simulates years of history (100 - 1000+), generating lineages, and wars and civilization expansion, and gods, and more.  Your can have your dwarves create carvings, many of which will reference this history.  The whole game is actually 3D, having 100+ levels (floors) depending on where you set out, but the game is presented on oldschool text graphics like Nethack / Rogue, showing one 'layer' at a time with 'ascii characters' (I think it is actually OpenGL underneath, and there are graphical tile sets, but the default are ascii characters).  The dwarves themselves all have back stores and preferences that you can read. Each dwarf has a description including hair color, ear shape, eye spacing, height, weight, build, etc., even though they are just represented by a single character on screen. There are over 100 skills in the game that each dwarf can level up through use. Fights are simulated in minute detail that you can read in battle reports, including different layers of fat, muscle or organs in the dwarfs or other creature, and include wrestling moves like head or arm locks, nerves can be severed and tendons can be cut causing the loss of the use of a limb, bones can be broken, combatants can be nauseated or knocked out, and strong blows can sever body parts, which will fly away leaving a trail of blood on screen ( red colored periods, commas, colons and semi-colons).

 

Speaking of which, while the Dwarf Fortress is the main mode of the game, there is also an adventure mode that plays a lot like Nethack / Rogue, except that you can also recruit NPCs to your party, who you only indirectly control, and go on missions for various town / factions, and even explore your previously abandoned fortresses.

 

 

To wrap this up, Prison architect is like a reverse Dwarf Fortress, one in which instead of have build a castle / fortress to stop outside attackers (goblins / monsters) from causing harm, you instead start with a contained, semi-hostile force, and have to build a living area (prison) for them and keep them happy and keep them from escaping.

 

So, if you've never played Dwarf Fortress, you should really give it a look.  Playing with the wiki open and even a good tutorial video or two is practically a necessity for new players, but over time a lot of it becomes second nature.

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A good conversation on the episode, but I was left a little luke warm Prison Architect.

 

I only did a few prisons - but intend to go back.

 

I felt they nailed the pace between expansion and ability to pay for expansion - the grant system worked and kept you just going. Building everything worked great, with a couple of quirks.

 

But there were some bugs and system failuires (about a month after "release") that killed it for me. In no particular order:

1. The integrity of my main prison (which was essentially a donut with a fence around it) failed as guards just started letting inmates slip out.. randomly. Inmates just started walking free. Noone seemed to care.

2. The workshop just didnt seem to work - it would full up with inputs, but I could never train anyone there let alone make anything.

3. The courses didnt seem to have sufficient throughput. For example - parole. Is it possible at all to get inmates through this on time? With a hard limit on the number of wardens and copious time and space allocated for it, I still had a huge back log - and nothing I could do. Googling it revealed that the answer seemed to be exploiting a game flaw by firing/hiring wardens while paused or something.

 

The final issue for me... I lacked an end game. I built it, it worked, it was profitable and... thats it. It would just run fine with little input from me sans the above bugs/system issues.. I was aching for a disaster button. Unleash a fire, Godzilla, alien, earthquake - the usual suspects!

 

So I built a few prisons, shrugged and played something else.

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As a fan of both 3ma and SU&SD it's always good to listen to these kinds of episodes.

 

I just wanted someone to say "Evil Genius" once - it's a game where you build and maintain a Bond villain's island lair. Prisoner maintenance and exploitation (in a classically evil way) is a big part of the game. And, unlike Prison Architect, Evil Genius does not end in an equilibrium state because the heroes who attack the island fortress grow stronger and more cunning over time.

 

Prison Architect certainly models more complex and realistic behavior, though, and I enjoyed the discussion of it.

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I just wanted someone to say "Evil Genius" once - it's a game where you build and maintain a Bond villain's island lair. Prisoner maintenance and exploitation (in a classically evil way) is a big part of the game. And, unlike Prison Architect, Evil Genius does not end in an equilibrium state because the heroes who attack the island fortress grow stronger and more cunning over time.

 

The base management part of Evil Genius is largely Dungeon Keeper with a 60's spy flick coat of paint, though, and it was less important than the (oddly abstract) plots & capers screen; base management was a distraction from what you were supposed to be doing (stealing stuff, breaking things, muscling rivals, killing & kidnapping people on the world stage) rather than the focus of the game.

 

I've played a fair amount of Evil Genius, and while I see the parallels, I'd have said there's a fairly large gulf between the two games.

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