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Rob Zacny

Episode 274: Mail call!

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What's the craziest thing you've ever seen a computer AI do? What kind of product does Rob use in his hair? Does Troy really sing showtunes all the time? (Yes.) Some of these questions are answered in this week's Q&A show!

 

Listen here.

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Hey guys, Just listening to the episode. 

 

 

Just now your talking about 

What are your feelings on the disembodied "historical force" or  generic "commander" that the player usually embodies in strategy games? Do you think we need to see more strategy games that put the player in a more realistic, specific and grounded role, like Captain Olimar in Pikmin or something similar?

 

Have you (or anyone here) played Mount&Blade:Warband?

 

 

It's the absolute best example I can think of, of putting yourself in the commanders seat of a battle. You have to issue orders to your force, try and coordinate them into formations, often it does just boil down to "Charge them down or Die" but. you have to do this all from 1st/3rd person, with rally flags and position markers. no top down gods eye view. (Floris mod helps tremendously) 

If you are knocked unconscious you have the ability to leave standing orders to "charge" "retreat" "rally to you" or "stand too" etc. If your force is routed, you are captured and must pay to be released. If your forces win, you are injured but suffer nothing else. You level your character in skills ranging from Combat to tactics, logistics etc. You yourself can fight in the battle and often (as a hero type unit ) can swing the battle in your favor easily. BUT many a battle I lost when I was struck an unlucky blow at a inopportune time routing my forces, when,  if I had been there and not been in the thick of the fighting could have easily directed my army to victory.

 

Charging at the head your valiant knights into the flank of the enemy is wonderful, until you get unhorsed, then trampled....and finally knocked unconscious by the surrounding mob beating you to the ground with sticks....

 

 

It's a unique and interesting mix of Strategy, simple logistics, force composition, tactics, RPG and fighting. 

 

 

I haven't listened to all the 3MA episodes ever but it would be a fantastic (older) game to discuss if it hasn't been before. 

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While clearly we each like what we like .... I think Rob is missing the boat on the Wargame: Airland Battle series and might just be missing something good by being dismissive after a cursory glance.  A cursory look might lead one to believe it is just another RTS with tanks and troops, but I think this game has some unique features, depth, and 'playability' you don't see in a run of the mill RTS.   It's worth a Three Moves Ahead review to be sure.

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....also, I'd pay for more 3MA episodes....

 

 

No idea what is a good amount, or how many people at that amount it would take to allow Rob to churn out more or at least more consistently....My problem is no matter the method, I will forget to actually send money....

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Really excellent Q&A show. Both great questions and answers. I think my question maybe wasn't the most interesting, but it got the ball rolling, and I thought you guys did a great job of answering it.

 

If you guys do decide to ever do a Pikman episode you absolutely need to get Jake Rodkin on the show. You guys are so close to completing Idle Thumbs guest Bingo!

 

I also have an answer for you to Troy's question about games too small in scope. I definitely remember the episode about Blendo games' Flotilla and Atom Zombie Smasher, and people wishing the games weren't quite so tight in scope.

 

Finally, since you're asking, yes, I'd be happy to give money to a patreon to make the show easier to produce for you guys.

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Hey guys, Just listening to the episode. 

 

 

Just now your talking about 

 

Have you (or anyone here) played Mount&Blade:Warband?

 

 

It's the absolute best example I can think of, of putting yourself in the commanders seat of a battle. You have to issue orders to your force, try and coordinate them into formations, often it does just boil down to "Charge them down or Die" but. you have to do this all from 1st/3rd person, with rally flags and position markers. no top down gods eye view. (Floris mod helps tremendously) 

If you are knocked unconscious you have the ability to leave standing orders to "charge" "retreat" "rally to you" or "stand too" etc. If your force is routed, you are captured and must pay to be released. If your forces win, you are injured but suffer nothing else. You level your character in skills ranging from Combat to tactics, logistics etc. You yourself can fight in the battle and often (as a hero type unit ) can swing the battle in your favor easily. BUT many a battle I lost when I was struck an unlucky blow at a inopportune time routing my forces, when,  if I had been there and not been in the thick of the fighting could have easily directed my army to victory.

 

Charging at the head your valiant knights into the flank of the enemy is wonderful, until you get unhorsed, then trampled....and finally knocked unconscious by the surrounding mob beating you to the ground with sticks....

 

 

It's a unique and interesting mix of Strategy, simple logistics, force composition, tactics, RPG and fighting. 

 

 

I haven't listened to all the 3MA episodes ever but it would be a fantastic (older) game to discuss if it hasn't been before. 

 

My cousin is actually a huge fan of Mount & Blade and has said many of the same things that you're talking about here. I only ever played the demo of the first game. I guess I should check it out again.

 

Thanks for answering my question guys! It was a great discussion.

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While clearly we each like what we like .... I think Rob is missing the boat on the Wargame: Airland Battle series and might just be missing something good by being dismissive after a cursory glance.  A cursory look might lead one to believe it is just another RTS with tanks and troops, but I think this game has some unique features, depth, and 'playability' you don't see in a run of the mill RTS.   It's worth a Three Moves Ahead review to be sure.

 

It wasn't Wargame Airland Battle (which we've done a show on) but Command: Air Naval Operations

 

I suck at memory things.

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My cousin is actually a huge fan of Mount & Blade and has said many of the same things that you're talking about here. I only ever played the demo of the first game. I guess I should check it out again.

 

Thanks for answering my question guys! It was a great discussion.

 

 

I think Floris mod is on Steam workshop? if not its on Mod nexus or whatever its called. The default game is good, but Floris adds extra orders you can issue etc. It really does feel like your the actual commander in a Total war game. 

 

 

The other thing is that you get to know your troops....not in the "they have personalities" way, but, you recruit peasants from villages, then through battle and your training them personally, (Training skill is a must, don't overlook it) Your troops go from raw recruit peasants up through the ranks to elite cavalry, or other high tier unit. You can pick their progression through the "tech" tree. 

 

So committing your hard won skilled troops to a losing engagement is not something to be taken lightly, its not like you can just go que up more high tier elite knights for some gold etc. YOU have to personally raise them from the country side, train them etc. It adds a depth lots of strategy games don't have....of course, the tactics aren't the best, but there is plenty of hand to hand fighting on your part to worry about as your character is truly a hero unit...think, 4 star Gold general from Rome:totalwar, you can literally change the outcome of the fight, but, gotta be careful.....

 

 

 

There are also great mods that turn the game into feudal Japan...also very good....

 

 

 

again, it would be a great podcast if its never been discussed before. 

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I subscribe to Linux Weekly News, and have for quite a while now.  They have varying levels of subscriber (starving student, professional, manager), all of which have the same access, though you do get a tag based on your subscription level in the forum.  Their subscriptions are annual, IIRC, though you can put down for more than one year if you want.

 

All of their content unlocks when it's a week old.  So, subscribers get stuff a week before non-subscribers, but the back catalog is out there for everyone.  They were trying to strike a balance between being invisible (ie: having everything hidden behind a paywall where nobody would ever find it) and not making any money.

 

The result actually works fairly well; there's a mild kind of "you really ought to subscribe, that's how they keep doing what they do" social pressure, along with the pressure of not being at the front of the line when new stuff comes out, but if you're patient and aren't the sort of person who wants to comment on the forums, you can still get access to everything without paying. 

 

Subscriptions also have the benefit of being a more obvious transaction for the listener; a donation kind of feels like a tip for services rendered, while a subscription feels more like payment for future services. A tip is easy to put off, but "If I pull out my credit card I can have that podcast now instead of next tuesday".  A subscription also carries the message of "doing this isn't free, if it's going to be sustainable the people who are enjoying it are going to need to pitch in".

 

Obviously, a podcast is a different thing from a news site, though there are enough technical articles on LWN that older articles remain relevant the way 3MA back issues do; there's enough similarity to draw some useful parallels.  The main problem with the LWN model is how to release a podcast to subscribers a week early without screwing up people's podcast programs.  There would probably have to be separate subscriber and non-subscriber lists.

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It's not likely that there would be a lot of extra subscriber stuff, since I am not sure how Patreon even does that. We can't send out the links early because we're pretty last minute ourselves. Bonus podcasts? More work we would never do. 

 

Probably it would be just "hey, if you want to support us, that would be awesome. For 2$ a month, Rob can eat and I won't have to put down my imaginary dog"

 

But if there are any ideas for incentives, we'd be happy to hear them.

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We can't send out the links early because we're pretty last minute ourselves.

 

If you were to follow the LWN model the idea would be (I think?) to create two podcast feeds; 3MA-subscribed and 3MA.  They would contain the same actual podcasts; no extra recording or editing.  The 3MA podcasts are just the 3MA-subscribed podcasts with a one-week lag.  So, when you have a podcast finished to your satisfaction, you push it out to 3MA-subscribed.  One week later, you push the same podcast (unaltered) to 3MA.  It should (hopefully?) be very little extra work, though I've never gone through the steps of releasing a podcast myself, so I'm just guessing at how much effort it is to prime the feeds.

 

The podcast player I use (Downcast on iOS) is capable of supporting podcast feeds that require a login and password, so I presume that's a relatively common feature.  You make 3MA-subscribed take a login and password; maybe even the same one for everyone unless you're seeing way more downloads than subscribers.

 

For subscribers, maybe you see if there's a way to flag subscription levels on these forums; maybe some sort of icon.  You could also (if you wanted to, with a little more effort) stick a trailer for the current 3MA-subscribed podcast in 3MA, so that when an episode comes out for subscribers, everyone else gets a "Now Playing" to show them what they could be listening to now instead of next week if they throw some cash in the hat.

 

For the record, personally I'd happily drop $52/yr to support the podcast, but that would probably be mid or upper tier.  You'd probably want to do something like: $15/yr, $30/yr, $52/yr tiers.  The difference between them would purely be a matter of "support us to the level you think you comfortably can".

 

I think it would be workable?  That said, I'm one person; I've no idea who else in the audience would consider subscribing.

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We're researching a ton of options, but will probably go for the loosest possible one instead of tying people to a committment. That's kind of the great thing about patreon - if you want to give 1 dollar a month, 5 dollars a month, 10 dollars a month then you can.

 

Of course, it's also harder to keep track of fluctuations from month to month, but it will certainly do better than our sporadic donation drives a few years ago.

 

Thanks for the input Hexgrid. Lots to think about.

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Hi guys - donation ideas, is it worth following the Gamers with Jobs model and having a month long donation drive? I'm more than happy to donate if it keeps you guys doing the podcast - it's one of my weekly highlights - but a short sharp focused effort seems to work really well for the GWJ crew, why not just copy the idea? Something tells me they wouldn't mind ;)

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One thing you might consider.  On the podcast, it was said that there are some games that people want featured, but are hard to review either due to time commitment or pure cost (ie: the "not all of us have ipads or copies of the game" problem).  I wonder if there's a way to do per-game or per-topic funding drives in addition to whatever model you use for funding the podcast.  If there was a game I wanted you guys to tackle and there was a "Add $ to make it happen sooner." button somewhere, I'd make use of it.

 

That also goes for hardware; I'm not in a place where I can just buy you guys ipads, but if there were to be a funding drive specifically for getting hardware for some purpose (ipads, game consoles, better PC components, better recording equipment...), I'd throw some money in the pot.

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......isn't this a strategy game podcast? why are we discussing Ipads and consoles? (jokes, but seriously) 

 

 

PC components yes

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Hi :-)

 

Thanks for the great shows :)

 

The gaming website I write for (as a senior user) uses similar methods as described by hexgrid. Among other bonusses, if you subscribe, you get to see a certain video format two hours earlier than the non-subscribers. You can also do a "one-time-purchase" of 99 Euro-Cent to see it immediately. This could be done for 3MA as well.


Personally, I believe sufficient ppl might subscribe without actual bonusses but just to support the show. Obviously, this would (or at least should) put you in a position where you could maybe communicate how the money is used. I like your idea, Troy, to install a system where ppl can subscribe for a sum of money they can determine.

 

----------------

 

Another suggestion: The same webpage asks for donations for specific purposes, usually around christmas, that benefit the webpage and content produce (e.g. a new camera). You could, by way of example, ask for donations for an iPad for Rob or a trip to Firaxiscon or to allow you to make time available to discuss a very time demanding game. You could set the amount you need and ask for donations. If the money donated does not suffice and any excess money could be carried over to the next project. I suggest to not use Kickstarter etc. due to the extra costs involved.

 

You could even do a poll, e.g.: Would you like us to discuss the time demanding game A, B or C.

 

This way it could also be ensured that your listeners are actually interested in the time/money consuming topic (well, interested enough to (help) financing it ;) ).

 

Personally, I would be most interested in more games being discussed, including time demanding games. I am not interested in iPad games (I don't have an iPad). I not that interested in trips to events either. Of course, every person has different priorities and could help funding accordingly.

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......isn't this a strategy game podcast? why are we discussing Ipads and consoles? (jokes, but seriously) 

 

If a platform has a CPU, it has strategy games on it, and some of those games are unique to that platform.  As far as I'm aware, Dark Wizard is only available on SegaCD.  Dragon Force was only on the Saturn.  Almost all of the long-running Daisenryaku series is on console only. The Carnage Heart series has been Sony-exclusive.  Koei's strategy games have been mostly console as well; there's a new Nobunaga's Ambition in the pipe, but AFAIK it's not coming to PC.  I don't remember anything on PC like Valkyria Chronicles, and there's nothing like the vast array of "tactical RPGs" available on console.

 

I also don't recall anything on PC quite like the Sangoku Musou (Dynasty Warriors) series.  At first glance, it's a brawler where you play a crazy-powerful warrior laying waste to everything near you on a gigantic battlefield.  That only gets you so far, though; you're massively powerful, but you're on a large, fluid battlefield with allies who aren't nearly as capable as you.  If you just try to smash your way through, you'll start failing the later scenarios.

 

You have to pay attention to the map.  The battle ebbs and flows, and you need to pay attention to the critical points, get there and reinforce them before they become a crisis.  If anything, it winds up playing somewhat like Caesar described his battles; you race around the battlefield averting disaster, trying to figure out if you have enough time to stay here and finish the job before that gate over there falls...

 

There's tons of stuff on iOS as well.  Native things, and things that are hard to play on PCs these days.  I quite recommend Slay, for instance; it's a port of a windows game, sure, but the iOS and Android versions of it run well, and it's really well suited to a quick play on the bus or in line at the bank if you've got five minutes to kill and a craving for a simple wargame.  There's also a serviceable port of the original Warlords, which remains a fun game.

 

There's also a reportedly excellent port of Warhammer Quest, amongst many other things.

 

Limiting yourself to PC is like only ever eating pizza.  It's tasty, there's a lot of variety, but you're missing a whole world of other good experiences.  The same goes for any platform.

 

I'd love to see 3MA tackle one of Koei's long-running strategy series; Nobunaga's Ambition, Genghis Khan or Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Doing that would require a lot of time investment, and also a fair amount of hardware investment, though; old consoles or emulators, new consoles, and yes, PCs.  I think it would be worth it, though; the three series above have some of the longest lineage of any computerized strategy series, and they're still being produced.  The first Nobunaga's Ambition was the first game Koei ever shipped, in 1983, and there's a new one on the way.  That's a 31 year history across a variety of platforms, including PC and consoles.

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Listening to the podcast now, and you just addressed the question regarding 90's game nostalgia, and whether there is something untapped from that era.  

 

I think you guys missed the "correct" answer to that question,at least as far as 4x games are concerned.  ;)  Go back and play Masters of Orion and Imperialism II.  What you will notice is that the games manage to get enormous strategic depth out of rather simple mechanics.  Compare that to the 4x games of the last 10 years.  The newer games tend to simply pile on more and more mechanics and features.  While I like these games, there is something beautiful about playing MOO and Imperialism II, which are almost chess-like in comparison.  

 

My .02.  

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I don't know subscriber numbers but it feels that 3MA is less popular than it should be. I've heard about it last year from Paradox News page (there was a link to Crusader Kings 2 DLC show). And I mostly play strategy games for many years. I hope you have enough listeners so that you could produce shows with affordable prices.

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I don't know subscriber numbers but it feels that 3MA is less popular than it should be. I've heard about it last year from Paradox News page (there was a link to Crusader Kings 2 DLC show). And I mostly play strategy games for many years. I hope you have enough listeners so that you could produce shows with affordable prices.

 

I try my best to promote 3MA in Germany :) For about a year or so I have been writing news for a German online magazine for every single episode. Often lovely discussions followed suit :)

 

I think in one of the more recent podcasts the guys mentioned that subscriber numbers are constantly growing?

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We are constantly growing, yes. Not huge numbers, not Idle Thumbs numbers, but strong word of mouth and I meet listeners all over the place. We have come a long way from the days when 200 downloads a week was cause for celebration.

 

We have tried the month long donation drive before but a) we don't have a strong web presence to keep reminding people like GWJ does, and B) it was only moderately successful. A more regular place like a Patreon or GoFundMe or something similar means we can promote it more regularly and new listeners can just step right in.

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If there aren't that many listeners then setup a paypal account and remind me at the end of each episode and I'll donate something. 

 

 

I heard about 3MA on the Rome Total War 2 forums when someone pointed to your review of that game.....I then found Idle Thumbs etc. Really, I never listened to podcastes before 3MA so....good job that

 

 

lots of good points about strategy games being on other shit besides computers

 

 

Was joking but ok  :P

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