Rob Zacny

Episode 212: Set Disruptors to Acts of God

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Troy, Julian, Dave Heron, and Rob talk about the role of extraordinary disruptions in strategy games. From acts of God to the acts of Khan, why don't more strategy games include disruptions? And should they?

 

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I am listening through past episodes of 3MA right now. I am currently in the middle of Episode 100: The Sacking of Troy. I just wanted to let you know, whoever put a gigantic picture of Charlton Moses Heston on the front page, you have ensured that I will ramp up my listening speed as much as humanly possible so that I can more quickly arrive at the episode with the gigantic picture of Charlton Moses Heston. It will be mine, like my dog or my horse or my falcon, only I will love it more...................and trust it less.

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I think a major case here that needs to be considered is the case of games about the WWII Eastern Front, and Barbarossa in particular. The major aspect of that war is the onset of mud, then blizzard, and the effect of it on the German attack. Overall, I don't think a lot of games capture that well - mostly because the player has the benefit of expecting it, and so can make preparation against it.

 

Unrelatedly, Betrayal at House on the Hill is a great example of a game built around a disruption element.

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    I wonder about the possibility of positive disruption.  As I recall, in an episode about one of the Paradox grand strategy games (was it EU?  Crusader Kings?  Victoria?  I can't recall...) something was said about how you could be presented with opportunities that were so potentially lucrative that they made you seriously consider throwing your strategy overboard or at least sidetracking it.  Rather than a disaster, a game could potentially present the players with something potentially disruptively beneficial.

 

    Along similar lines, I think the problem with disruptive change as discussed in this episode is that it tends to be expressed in stats and force deployment.  You lose units, or there is a penalty on some stat or group of stats.  I think a potentially more interesting direction to take disruption is in the direction of capabilities.  Maybe there was something you could do before that you now can't do, either for a little while or for the rest of the game (Blight wipes out the crops forever; you can buy food, but you can't grow it any more.  Deal with it.).  Or maybe there's something you can do now, but it replaces something you used to be able to do (sea-skimming missile launching unmanned drones make submarines the only practical water vessel).  Or perhaps you simply gain a new ability.  Or the rift valley between you and your main enemy becomes a saltwater sea.

 

    It would probably be most interesting in a game where your abilities were modified or honed by events.  The disruption could be rare, but when it occurs you lose two abilities and gain one more powerful ability.  Maybe (say, in a somewhat crazed WW1 game) a contrivance of events leaves you unable to build artillery or heavy infantry, but you gain fast zeppelin dropships carrying cavalry.  Suddenly your hold on your trenches is much weaker and the front is liable to be overrun, but you can hit your hard opponent in places they thought were completely safe.  So now he's desperately trying to scrounge together a home guard while his industry burns, and you're trying to destroy his infrastructure before he can kick his way to your capitol.

 

    I think that's the kind of place where disruption could really work, and I think this could feed into a solution to the snowballing problem and the midgame stagnation problem.  Use disruption to break the symmetry in stagnant situations.

 

    I don't know if this episode is going to affect my current design, but it's certainly got me thinking about it.  Keep up the good work, guys.

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The game I immediately thought of was Galactic Civilisations 2, which has a system of random galactic events. These would affect everyone- you and the AI players. You might get an economic boom or depression for an unknown number of turns, or everyone could get infested with spies and have to spend resources rooting them out. There were more serious shake ups of the pecking order, like informing the player that an AI player now has an ancient artifact that will cause them to become more powerful over time until they'll steamroll everyone, forcing the player to attempt to wipe them out. Or the Dread Lords could appear, and you'd have to find them fast and hope you can take them out, or lose the galaxy to an ancient evil.

 

Now I'm thinking of Sword of the Stars, which had Grand Menaces. You could set how many you wanted to show up when you set up the game (one is usually more than enough!), but you wouldn't know which you you'd get or when, and each one had different consequences and had to be dealt with differently.

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A (board) game that I think has excellent disruptive events (There are probably quite a few) is the Game of thrones board game. Every turn (except the first), three event cards are drawn that might throw off your plans for the coming turn completely. A game-winning strategy set up on the previous turn can be undone by the rain event card for instance, which can limit you to two march orders on the coming turn (instead of three). This functions by, as hexgrid formulated it, limiting your capabilities. It becomes a big deal (disruption), without it being a case of "you just lost the game because the wrong card came up".

PS: the Star Trek episode is scheduled for ep250 if I recall correctly, someone listening to old episodes will have to confirm.

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Game changing disruptions are common, even expected, in roguelikes.  The expectation is that you will have to deal with whatever adversity you face the best you can, and it can vary wildly between runs.  

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Game changing disruptions are common, even expected, in roguelikes.  The expectation is that you will have to deal with whatever adversity you face the best you can, and it can vary wildly between runs.  

 

    I think this is a case of "that's the game", though; there isn't really much strategy to roguelikes so much as there is (nearly?) endless firefighting and crisis management.  Which can be very fun; don't get me wrong, I've been having fun with roguelikes since Gateway to Apshai and Sword of Fargoal were new.  But I don't think you can really call what happens in them "disruptions", because they don't make you re-evaluate anything.  At its core a roguelike is a sequence of unrelated semirandom crises each of which may have some strategic solution internally, but which will only affect your future decisions in so much as the resolution of any given crisis strengthens or weakens your hand.

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Unless you're playing a Chaos Warrior in Zangband, in which case levelling is frequently a disruptive event. I do love me some Chaos in that game.

 

Perhaps someone will correct me, but I seem to recall the galactic events in GalCiv 2 were not completely random, and that the game attempted to work out which events would cause the most disruption to the current galactic order and be more likely to use those. It's an interesting idea.

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This is a really easy solution. Acts of god are fine and can run concurrent with a typical strategy game and It is not necessary to build an entire game around that disruption. If you want acts of God in your game you simply have to introduce a means of gauging probabilities for those disasters in the future. Oracles, Sibyls and prophetic predictions have been common throughout history and fits a historical context without making it fantastic. Most of history have been steeped in superstitious beliefs and leaders throughout that history have consulted with diviners who were supposedly conduits with the Gods/God. You want a more modern setting simply turn them into advisors who are aware of impending disasters. 

 

Mechanically all you have to do is consult these advisors as to their prophetic predictions. They would give some indication about potential incoming disruptive events that the player would be able to account for. How vague you wanted to make these can be easily tied to either a skill level of that advisor/oracle or tied to information gathering units. I'll use an example, of which there are plenty, Nero consulted Delphi after killing his own mother "Your presence here outrages the god you seek. Go back, matricide! The number 73 marks the hour of your downfall!".  Nero interpreted this as predicting a long reign as he in expected to live until 73, instead Galba's revolt ended Nero's reign. Galba was 73 years old.

 

How steeped the decision making process then becomes is a matter of choice for the player. Remember that the predictions become probabilities rather then historical inevitabilities so the player decides how much to listen to them.

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Mechanically all you have to do is consult these advisors as to their prophetic predictions. They would give some indication about potential incoming disruptive events that the player would be able to account for. How vague you wanted to make these can be easily tied to either a skill level of that advisor/oracle or tied to information gathering units. I'll use an example, of which there are plenty, Nero consulted Delphi after killing his own mother "Your presence here outrages the god you seek. Go back, matricide! The number 73 marks the hour of your downfall!".  Nero interpreted this as predicting a long reign as he in expected to live until 73, instead Galba's revolt ended Nero's reign. Galba was 73 years old.

 

    The great thing about this, of course, is that because we're dealing with code we can actually make these more than clever fakery.  The oracles (and psychics and astrologers and so forth) generally had to rely on the fact that people want to find connections and there are so many things you can connect that any vague prophecy can be justified ex post facto.  If Galba hadn't happened to have been 73, something else that happened to be countable as 73 would have been used as the explanation.  The oracles were pretty good at playing that game.

 

    When the whole world is driven by code, though, the game could have a force of 73 legions show up on the 7th month of the 3rd year after the "prophecy", lead by 73 generals each of whom was 73 years old.  Rather than relying on a con based on people wanting to believe, a game can tell you (as vaguely or exactly as it wants) what is going to happen, and then arrange for it to actually happen.  No matter how ludicrously impossible.

 

    I do think the interesting idea of disruption, though, is when it really does force you to reconsider your strategy.  I think that does need to happen randomly, because if the system is taking the state of the game world into consideration when making the decision to cause a disruption it becomes something you can game, and therefore potentially becomes part of your overall strategy.  If you knew, for example, that if medicine stockpiles fall below a certain level worldwide in a game of Europa Universalis it would cause a zombie apocalypse, you might actually try to make it happen.

 

    There's a classic example of this kind of thing in the original Command & Conquer.  I don't remember the exact details because I wasn't as much of a C&C player as my colleagues at the time, but it went something like this: If you lose your base in C&C, the first crate you find will always be a base construction vehicle.  If you deploy a construction vehicle, it becomes a base.  If you sell it, you get an engineer who can capture a building.

 

    So what my colleagues would do when playing against each other is, right at the beginning of the game, deploy their base building vehicle into a base, sell it to get the engineer, and then run around with the engineer looking for (1) a crate, to get their base vehicle back, and (2) another player's base.  Once they found another player's base, usually that player hadn't had time to build any defences yet, so the engineer goes in and takes over their base unopposed.  Game over player 2.

 

    That's admittedly more abusing rubber banding than it is abusing disruptive events, but the thinking behind it is similar.  Any mechanism available to players for manipulation becomes fair game for strategic use.  Truly disruptive events need to come out of the blue.

 

    On the other hand, as you suggest, that's totally compatible with a prophecy or adviser system.  Practically speaking, "the world is going to change in 5 turns" is every bit as disruptive as "the world just changed".  You just have a little longer to deal with the consequences before they arrive.

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Clearly I played GalCiv 2 with the galactic events switched off or something. Certainly don't remember the dread lords showing up in the sandbox mode. Endless space dabbles in this too the effects tend to be too eneamic to have much effect. I think if you are flu to have disruptive events then have really disruptive events - having the locust pitch up on your doorstep out the blue in SotS wasa truely horrifying event. Even if you survived you'd be completely battered at the end it. Just surviving could be an achievement afterwards.

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The podcast hit most of the salient points, but I did want to note a couple things:

 

 

It seems like you bounced back and forth between historical-disruptive events and gameplay-disruptive ones. These are sometimes mutually exclusive. As noted, historical disruptions are hardly a surprise, so things like Mongol invasions aren't a useful discussion in terms of disruptive gameplay.

 

Re: the Godzilla-defense simulator. I think Dave(?) was overstating this point. This is only true if you build a city differently to defend against Godzilla than you would against alien invasion. Otherwise, it's irrelevant to your gameplay decisions. More to the point, monsters in Simcity are fun for 2 reasons:

1. The core activity is building a city. Monsters allow you to continue engaging in this activity. It doesn't shift goals or mechanics at all.

2. It's fun to watch monsters blow up a city.

The second point is really important from a design perspective, even if it isn't a strategic factor.

 

Also, I think there's something that was alluded to in the discussion but not addressed. In order for disruption to be fun, it has to feel fair. But "feeling fair" has a lot of variables. If it comes too near the end of the game, you can get screwed without chance of recovery. If it comes too near the beginning, it becomes irrelevant. Something that has a 1% chance will never feel fair unless you play way more than 100 games. There was a discussion a while back about how (I think) one of the Fire Emblem games has a "view percent" and a "true percentage" - which varies for your attacks of the enemies. If the UI says an enemy has a 50% chance to hit, this true percent was like 35%, because that what "felt like 50%" to players. Meanwhile, if the UI says that player has a 50% chance, he actually has a 60% chance. 

 

I've been playing a lot of Ascension recently, and the deck draw there can be hugely disruptive to any strategy, particularly with Event cards (which apply a global effect that favors a certain kind of card). But they don't feel "bullshit-y" because Ascension games are so short. I feel like there's some kind of formula that can apply here: Player acceptance = event importance * event frequency * event predictability / length of game

 

But there are some specific mechanics discussions that would be interesting to talk about. A disruptive event seems perfect for a deck-mechanic: something is going to happen, but you don't know which one. I do also wonder how fore-warning affects a player's acceptance of a random event. If you had a 10 turn warning that plague was coming somewhere in your empire, with progressively clearer hints where it would hit (People are coughing in Asia Minor...people have fevers in Turkey...Plague in Constantinople!), could you work that into a grand strategy game?

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I only have one really good example of a disruptive event. In the card game "Hearts", the general objective is to avoid taking points. Each round contains 26 possible points: one for each card in the heart suit, and 13 points for the Queen of Spades. However, if one player manages to take all of the points in a single round (ie. all of the hearts plus the Queen of Spades), that player takes no points for the round, and the other players take 26 points each. This is called "shooting the moon" or "taking control". 

 

So when playing the game, players will be playing so as to avoid taking tricks. However, once it becomes evident that someone is attempting to shoot the moon, each player's objective changes completely: you want to do what ever you can to take at least some points, because otherwise you will take the full 26. So within this one round, everyone's goals change completely. Further, "Shooting the Moon" successfully is rare and difficult enough that I think it still counts as disruptive. 

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Shooting the Moon is kind of like casting the spell of mastery in in Master of Magic... how disruptive it is depends on whether you get caught out of position.

 

I am a little bit confused... it seems like what you are looking for is a sweet spot between having a big change in the came that you can adjust for but isn't routine or easy enough to adapt to that it becomes just another part of the game.

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I am a little bit confused... it seems like what you are looking for is a sweet spot between having a big change in the came that you can adjust for but isn't routine or easy enough to adapt to that it becomes just another part of the game.

 

    That's the gist of it, I think.  If you think about (say) the Civilization series, can you think of any point in it past the first 10% of a game where you actually had to change strategy?  Without some form of disruption, a strategy game can easily turn into choosing a track and then riding it to the end of the game.  Sometimes that's what people want, and certainly it's no fun to be winning and then have the game reliably pull the rug out from under you.

 

    Once in a while, though, it would be nice if a game just tipped everything on its side and forced you (and everyone else in the game) to play under new rules.  Something to exercise the "reacting to changing circumstances" muscle.

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