Episode 243: Personal Highlight Reels

[Rob Zacny]

Julian, Bruce, and Rob sit down to discuss their favorite things from 2013. Rob and Bruce look forward to a Winter of Wargaming. Bruce and Julian argue about Waterdeep.

 

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[hexgrid]

Winter of Wargaming sounds promising. I'm looking forward to it.

 

Best wishes to Mr. Hermes. Eat lots of *********; supposedly it's got enzymes that help with tissue repair (or possibly it's laden with the healing placebo force of urban legend...), and it tastes good. Hope the recovery is quick.

[sclpls]

Winter of Wargaming sounds rad. Time for Blizzard to step aside, there's a new WoW in town.

[sclpls]

Also Rob mentioning that Newfoundland mission in XCOM induced a shiver. It is all kinds of fucked up-ness.

[Sorbicol]

That Newfoundland mission in XCOM:EW is a real gem that's for sure

[Kordanor]

I am wondering if Battle Worlds: Kronos slipped under your radar or you don't like that one, also because you haven't done a podcast about it yet though I'd consider it a major strategy title.

For those who don't know: Battle Worlds Kronos is the spiritual successor of the Battle Isle Series from Blue Byte (old German Studio) where especially the second part became cult. Battle Worlds: Kronos was done by King Arts who became well known for their adventure "Forgotten Tales", probably the best adventure game of the last decade.

The game caused a lot of headlines in the german media and I have already listened to a couple of podcasts about it. Maybe it's not that big outside of germany. Nevertheless it is a great game you can multiplayer and singleplayer.

The game also caused some discussion about "how hard should games be" as tons of players whined about the difficulty level of that game (hint: it wasn't too easy)

The developer even wrote a column on a german gaming magazine site about Difficulty in games which can be found here: http://www.pcgames.de/Battle-Worlds-Kronos-PC-139941/Specials/Gastkommentar-von-Jan-Theysen-Duerfen-Spiele-nicht-mehr-schwer-sein-1101751/

Translation to English via google: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&prev=_dd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcgames.de%2FBattle-Worlds-Kronos-PC-139941%2FSpecials%2FGastkommentar-von-Jan-Theysen-Duerfen-Spiele-nicht-mehr-schwer-sein-1101751%2F

[sclpls]

Someone pointed me to the BW: K kickstarter page, and I backed it. I played the game briefly in late beta, but I ended up bouncing off of it. It did not help that the English translation was poor. If that didn't get fixed by release that could explain why it has only been making a splash in Germany.

[Kordanor]

Actually there are typos even in the German texts. ^^

But I don't see how that has a big impact on the game overall.

[tberton]

A few points regarding the Lords of Waterdeep discussion:

 

First of all, the problem with Agricola's theme is not that it's boring. I would love to play a game about farming that really felt like it was about farming. instead, Agricola is really just Uwe Rosenberg making a successor to Caylus and deciding that farming was sort of a good fit for it.

 

Like Bruce, I have problems with Waterdeep, but the theme isn't one of them. I actually think it does its theme better than just about any worker-placement game I've played (with Last Will and Lancaster being the possible exceptions). It makes sense: you're a Lord, you sent your agents out to learn about rumours which indicate quests you can complete and then recruit heroes from around the city to help you complete the quests. I don't even mind that the heroes are cubes: I'm a Lord, every fighter looks the same to me - don't tell me your life story, just go kill the Xanathar. I've played with hero-shaped meeples and it really doesn't add that much.

 

Now, I do think Waterdeep is deeply (ha!) flawed. Basically, the quests and intrigue cards are too random. Depending on when they come out, they can either be super helpful or incredibly useless. And while I'm a fan of vindictive game mechanics, the Mandatory Quests are pretty much just Kingmaking cards when playing with more than 2 people. Also, the Lords don't feel unique enough. So I like the game, but I wish a few aspects of it would be redesigned from the ground up.

 

Also, what's with the Knizia burns? The dude is a pretty great designer, even if his best games are behind him. And some of his game's do feel quite thematic: Battle Line does make you feel like a general making difficult decisions about where to place troops and Poison kinda feels thematic if you think of it as a game of chicken between the dumbest wizards in the world.

[dauntless_dad]

I am looking forward to the Winter of Wargaming, even though I don't do as much of it as I used to.  I'd really like to find out what Bruce and Rob think about the new Combat Mission series of games, considering how much Bruce liked the original series (which I still love as well).  For some reason I can't seem to get as much enjoyment out of the new games as I did from the older ones, and I'd like to get a second and/or third opinion on the matter.

[Gormongous]

I wish I could play the Europa Universalis that Rob is playing, where the decisions are interesting and the game knows how to push back. Instead, at least for me and others to whom I've talked, it's yet another Paradox game where the really important mechanics (aggressive expansion, warscore, diplomatic attitudes) are hidden and have only one response, which is playing the historical "sandbox" the way Paradox wants you.

 

EU4 has really been the biggest reversal for me this year. Total War: Rome II was a more abject failure of design, but EU4 went from my favorite game of the year to one I don't intend to touch again at least until the summer, if at all. Paradox made a beautiful and transparent design, which proved to have a few major exploits, and because of them Paradox decided that they'd rather make a difficult game than a fun one, which would be fine, except the result was boring rather than either. Now we have a game where the historical expansion of the Ottomans is literally impossible and after 1750 every war is a world war. It's almost enough to send me howling back to EU3's bland malleability.

[spelk]

+1 Kudos for the Winter Wargaming idea.

[spelk]

One of my favourite games of the year (2013), just landed in alpha on Steam right at the end, its an intoxicating brew of roguelike-like, RPG, tower defense, dungeon crawler with exploration and resource management heavily built in. It's from the Endless Space developers Amplitude Studios, and its called Dungeon of the Endless.

Absolutely and unreservedly in love with this game, even in its Early Access state.

You have to carry your crashed shuttles power crystal through a maze of sci fi dungeon rooms. You only have the two heroes that crash landed. You open each airlocked door, with anticipation of what is beyond. As you deliberately carve a path through the maze to find the exit, you have to gather resources, industrial (to build things), biological (to heal and level up heroes), dust (dropped from the entrails of your enemy) to power up rooms with light and make the defences within functional. Dust is also the currency with which you can buy equipment/weapons from wandering merchants. So theres a balance between powering up a path, and getting new kit.

This intricate balance, means you have to be really careful which doors you open up, because from opened but darkened rooms come the snapping horde! In waves. Ultimately to see your heroes destroyed, but also to break the crystal and make the rooms dark again.

You command heroes, and tell them where to go, what to open. They auto-attack enemies in a room. You also build resource crystals on powered up rooms with appropriate crystal slots. Building a crystal costs industrial resources and gets increasingly more expensive. So first room has an industrial crystal, second room has a biocrystal, and so on. So that each open of a door, you net the resources pumped out by these structures. But with each open of the next door, comes the clawing enemy. They will destroy all crystals pumps if left to it. It's your job to place heroes, and defensive structures (turrets, mines, healing posts, extra damage posts) to prevent your demise.

As you carve this path through, you can turn power off to cul-de-sac in order to scrape together dust to buy kit, or to re-route power to another more resource lucrative track. But beware, darkened exposed rooms become sources of the creeping enemy. So make sure you have a heavily defended choke-point/killzone.

If damage to your defensive structures occurs some heroes have the ability to repair. Also, in combat you can spend bio crystals to heal heroes on the fly. However, this is also used to level up heroes (making them tougher) and also to buy new heroes you might meet stranded on the way. Always keep some bio spare to pickup new party members - you can have a max of four. Some are melee, some are ranged, some are healers, some are speedy, some are slow high hit points etc.

Lastly, once you have the exit in sight, use your resources and heroes to plot out a well protected lit path to the exit, then one of your heroes (I suggest a fast one) must uproot the original crystal and carry it to the exit, whilst under many waves of enemy clamouring to take your life and your crystal.

Absolutely thrilling stuff. Pixel art. Lovely lighting and effects. Only three levels of dungeon at present in the current early access, but its being crafted regularly with community feedback/votes etc. I've put many hours into it, and quite a bit of it isn't active yet (like crafting blueprints). It is a very playable game at the current state, and I can't wait to see what other complexities and excitement it has to offer during development.

[spelk]

My wargame of the year has to be Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm (even though Command Modern Air/Naval Operations is very tempting), simply because they get modern-ish (cold war gone hot era) warfare right.

 

 

I suppose "turn based Wargame AirLand Battle" might be overselling it a bit.

 

Its a WEGO chit based tactical wargame when the Russians make their move in the late 1980's.