Episode 280: Have Fun Storming the Castle

[Rob Zacny]

You think you can get into my castle? You can't. I've got a moat. I've got a moat, and I've got some big-ass walls. See those arrow slits? We're going to shoot arrows at you, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Because I am safe in this castle and you're just some puny little knight on a - oh, you think your ladders are going to help? Gonna put some ladders up and storm the walls? Well, I can - wait. Oh shit. Those are some good ladders. I can pour some oil on you, perhaps? Nope, you're already in the compound. Fifteen years of construction time, countless blocks of stone, and you beat me with a ladder. Shit.

 

Listen here.

[EmperorNortonI]

How's this for a different approach to the castle building genre.  Instead of tacking castles onto a medieval economic sim, have castle building as part of a multi-generational family simulator.

 

I am imagining the unholy spawn of Crusader Kings, the Sims, and a city/castle builder.  You control a lord, you have a family, you have your vassals, and you have your serfs.  Set it on a great big sprawling 3D ma, which is both the economic map and the battle map.  Tell your family members and vassals where to live, build forts or castles for them, and give them serfs to watch over.  Manage their marraiges, arrange a proper heir, deal with your neighboring lords, and muster your levies when the call to battle comes.  Fend off raids, deploying your forces from the various places you've stationed them - in this era, after all, you most powerful military force are your family members, mounted warriors born and bred to war.  As time passes, you can expand your lands, be betrayed by your family and vassals, and gradually build up your castle.  Maybe it could start all Dark Ages minimalist, a wooden pallisade around a hill, and then gradually people learn to work with better materials and build better forts.

 

Let the peasants take care of their economy.  I suppose one could build a bit of a sim into them, but from the perspective of the lord, there wouldn't be much to do with them.  That would be a good thing from a gameplay perspective, as plonking down waterwheels and dairy farms is not really the work of feudal warlords anyway.  As a player, one's family, the military force they represent, and the fortifications and defenses you build for them, are the key things to worry about.

 

It would be different, at any rate.

[hexgrid]

The castle/star fort simulator would actually make a pretty good core of a game; the question is, what kind of game?  I suppose you could do something like those "bridge builder" games, except the test would be "fend off this army" instead of "hold up while a train crosses".

 

I'm picturing something a little like Gratuitous Space Battles, where you design the castle and maybe do the initial troop deployment, but when the siege starts it's hands-off.

 

The larger question of "control the landscape here" is an interesting one, though; perhaps expanding the concept to "you have this much time, this much money, this set of people; prepare your defenses".  So, hey, build three forts and clifftop redoubt if you can make the budget work.  Maybe back it with a lightweight political sim where each year the local political powers eye you up and decide if/how to invade.

[Valorian Endymion]

Amazing show!

 

About Lords of the Realm:

 

- Fun thing, in Lords of the Realm I, you kind have a "disk one nuke" (aka winning strategy) with Sheep. I mean, you could sell wool at such high prices that you can afford very early on mercenaries and this gives you a very early game advantage, you could easily take several counties. In the second game they removed sheep.

- In both games you had to buy weapons for your troops, it was slight strange buying chain main and swords to my knights (but not the horses) (edit I just remembered, that you had to buy horses too) it was quite fun. However because of the sheep and wool, if someone and you could afford mercenaries, the other side unless they also could field mercenaries, they would be in huge problems, since they need weapon and people to to have any chance to survive, and early one this quite hard.

- I like more siege in Lords of the Realm I, where you had more detailed control of how much of your soldiers would look for supplies and how many would build or operate siege engines. At each turn you decided what each siege engine would do while the other side decided if they will hold fast or give up, it was slow since with several assaults and barrages. However it was very rare to you become besieged.

- Got to agree about the battle on Lords of the Realm II, most times I found out that attacking caused way to high casualities, unless you take time to go all way around the enemy and attack from behind (they didn´t react much) which somehow caused much less casualities.

- There is another Impressions game, which quite use the same model of economy - Lords of Magic, it lack the whole farming part, but you had to assign people to different things in your capital.

- Yep the third game was a disaster from what I heard, it take very long time in development too - when it finnaly released, games such Medieval Total War I and Stronghold I had already been released which make the situation for Lords of the Realm III even worst, since it meant you had even less reason to try it.

 

Stronghold

- I have to absolute agree about how wall look made of paper. It often resulted in strange situations, where you still have an archer in top of something that once was a all but now could be described as a "column" in the middle of nothing connecting to nothing. Or you have a archer firing at the swordsman as the wall beneath him slowly vanish and eventualy he and the swordsman are at the same ground.

- One first game, you didn´t had lions, but bears, and believe me if you run in one of them early one you would be huge problem, even your lord was quite weak to it.

- Talking about lords, I remember them begin quite fragile in the first game, which was good and bad, since losing them was rather easy.

- Agree again on the game begin way to fast - even if claimed that different troops had different roles it was very hard to control or even noticed anything.

- Also I have to agree about the game not begin sure of what kind of tone would like to have - in one hand you had all those medieval clichés of dark ages plus lot of torture devices which kind suggest something, but you got all those comic character with names such as "rat", "pig", "wolf" and personalities to match which kind feel like strage a comedy or fairy tale thing. I don´t understand why they haven´t made like Lords of the Realm, which each character had a real titles and personality to match, but feel much more natural and coherent with the tone and theme of the game.

 

Small curiosity - there was a another game called Stronghold, this one did by SSI with the D&D license it was curious city build with first person view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stronghold_%281993_video_game%29)

 

Age of Empires:

- I agree with Rob how the game allowed you to build a amazing castle, shame thay you can´t put archers in the walls. Also due how rts works you often didn´t have much time to build the exact way you wanted.

[Gormongous]

Rob: In this fantasy version of the crusades, you have to convince people to come to your castle.

Me: Yeah, that's authentic.

Rob: The main way you do this is with beer.

Me: ...

 

I've long suspected that the Stronghold: Crusader series wasn't meant for people with any interest in or knowledge of the historical crusades, but this show confirms it for me. On the other hand, Lords of the Realm seems to captured the spirit of Bisson's "crisis" thesis over a decade before he wrote it. I know which one I'll be checking out someday...

[sclpls]

Castles 2! I played a bunch of that in jr. high school, but completely forgot about it until I listened to this episode! Of course it is available on GOG... excellent.

[Gormongous]

Also, with regards to why castles are the premise but not the core of any castle-building game, I wonder if it's just the natural process of trying to design a fun game. I mean, if the simulation of medieval warfare is sufficiently thorough, then castle-building is a solved problem. Given any kind of terrain, there is an existing design (or at least an existing design principle) that will defend that terrain optimally. The choices to complicate that are to introduce gunpowder (which defeats the point of a castle-building game, both figuratively and literally), to kneecap the simulation (which the Stronghold games seem to do as well), or to place stricter limits on the actual building of the castle. I imagine that it would be hard for a team not to expand the point-buy system that Rob and Troy float into a full economic model and then have that suck away a lot of their development resources and gameplay focus.

[I Saw Dasein]

You guys missed one of the best castle-building games ever--Rampart! Great combination of an area-control game, a Tetris-like puzzle game, a tower defence game, and (of course) arcade goodness. 

 

[riadsala]

Also, surely Dwarf Fortress deserves a mention? You get to build up defences, gates, death traps, etc etc. And it's all combined with an impenetrable interface as a last ditch defence

[sclpls]

I'm not sure the castle genre does Dwarf Fortress justice.

[riadsala]

I'm not sure the castle genre does Dwarf Fortress justice.

 

 

Of course it doesn't. But that doesn't mean it's not a fantastic fort/castle building game which offers a lot of the gameplay Rob was hankering after. For example, you get to study the map and terrain and pick a spot that will be defensible, while still giving you access to fresh water etc.

 

I hear it's a bit easier to get into now what with improved support for graphical visualisers.

 

How come 3MA have never done a DF show? Don't tell me Rob and Troy are too casual for the game Actually, that would be a really interesting discussion: get some of the regular panel who haven't played before to spend a week trying to get into it, then report back (an invite a guest who knows the game pretty well to flesh things out).

 

I'm not a huge DF fan, but it's a fascinating project. I try and figure out how to play every couple of years. I can get some basic stuff built, but then either the learning curve or pacing causes me to lose interest. I wonder if Captain Duck has done tutorial videos since the latest big patch.

[Michael]

How come 3MA have never done a DF show? Don't tell me Rob and Troy are too casual for the game Actually, that would be a really interesting discussion: get some of the regular panel who haven't played before to spend a week trying to get into it, then report back (an invite a guest who knows the game pretty well to flesh things out).

 

I can tell you that it’s been discussed a few times. I enjoy DF quite a bit and have thrown it out there, but the problem is the scope of the game. It’s so dense and complex that the coverage our panelists have the time to allow would not be deep enough to truly satisfy any DF fans out there. If fact, it would probably get them angry. So the problem is depth vs variety: In order to host a weekly show the panelists have to play a variety of games. Something like DF requires a significant time investment at a high opportunity cost.

 

The most common criticism of the show that I see is when “Europa4Lyfe82” (who has played for 1000 hrs) posts that the panelists didn’t even MENTION Obscure Feature #245, so obviously they didn’t even really play the game and shouldn’t be talking about it. That’s the situation with DF but magnify it several times over. 

 

But never say never!

[voxn]

"why are castles cool?" at the start of the episode is a good question.

 

I think castles are cool (voxn, age 5), but have no interest in constructing labyrinths and traps. For me they are impressive as the last great structures built of purely human effort, before the advent of diesel engines etc started exponentially magnifying the work of a single person, and modern materials removed a lot of interesting constraints medieval architects labored under. They seem of almost unbelievable proportion in relation to the means they were built with, and that that size served a very specific function (beyond being impressive) gives them a weight I just don't feel with modern superstructures. To have the same draw a modern structure would have to be built on a scale that just doesn't exist; like a space elevator, or some other piece of purely conceptual architecture.

 

 

edit; as I think about this more I'm convinced it's the strategic value that is majority of the draw. As staggering as something like the burj khalifa is, it's completely frivolous - a show of wealth - a tourist attraction. It completely lacks the gravity a castle must have had, as this unbreakable fortress for which I don't think there is a modern analog.

[BobbyBesar]

Man, I played the hell out of the Castles series. It's the reason I have a deep abiding hatred for celts to this day. F'in celts! Leave my castle alone!

I'm pretty sure my child-brain couldn't handle the idea if sending your troops to intercept the enemy army before hitting the castle (at least, not unless there was ongoing construction or holes in my walls. The obvious superiority of archer-slits was too intoxicating for me.