Recommend me a game

With Christmas coming up, I am - sadly - finding few games that I want or need as a gift.

Age of Empires III? Got it. Civ IV? Got it. Legion Arena? Got it. Blitzkrieg 2? Got it. Barbarian Invasion? Got it.

Imperium? Not out yet. Rise of Legends? Not out yet. Rise and Fall? Maybe never coming out.

So my feeble list amounts to Dragonshard (because people say I should try it), The Movies and Call of Duty 2 (because my students say I should try it. Yes, I know it's a shooter and that I will die.)

Lame.

Here's you chance, loyal readers, to pitch me a strategy game that would look good under my tree. I prefer historical strategy and war games, but am certainly not averse to trying something else.

Oh, and make it interesting. Something I may know nothing about or a game that is under the radar would be very cool.

Stainless Steel Studios Stops

In what is a shocking piece of Thanksgiving news, strategy game developer Stainless Steel Studios is no more. There isn't a lot of information on the whys and wherefores. Their main site is down so there is no official announcement or press release. The above linked forum suggests that the heavily promoted and very promising Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War is near completion but, at the moment, doesn't have a publisher to fund the final stage of development.

Daniel Higgins posts that many in the company are already moving on to greener pastures, which suggests that the collapse wasn't a complete surprise to everyone. Just the gamers, it seems.

SSS has had a mixed legacy to this point. Their first big title, Empire Earth, was named Gamespy's game of the year when it came out, but it never achieved the gamer following or respect that other RTS games did. It is never referred to as a seminal title in the field. Their second effort, Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, was narrower in focus than Empire Earth but was, in my opinion, a better game.

It's too soon to analyze what went wrong. The fact that SSS did not work on either the expansion or sequel to Empire Earth always struck me as peculiar. Tilted Mill used a Stainless Steel engine for Children of the Nile, so their technical skills were in some demand.

The action-RTS plan for Rise and Fall is an intriguing twist on a sub-genre that could use a radical reinvention beyond issues of physics and 3D art. I do hope that somebody can release it and we can see the final result of many years of hard work.

Good luck to all the Stainless Steel employees. I hope you all find good jobs doing what you love to do.

Developer Interview: Michael Akinde

In the first of what I hope will be many interviews with independent strategy game developers, Michael Akinde agreed to answer some questions about Imperium: Rise of Rome, game design and the place of history in the game business.

This interview was originally going to be the first thing published on my new domain, but my intended host had some issues that need to be straightened out. Here it is in any case.

Akinde is a regular reader of Portico and occasional commenter. Hopefully he can answer any further questions any of you might have about Imperium.

(My questions are in bold, his answers follow.)

What gaming experiences have been the biggest influences on Imperium?

A tough question to start out on. I have played a lot of games, and try to learn something of both the good and the bad from each of them. But if I were to pick just one gaming experience, it would probably be playing the boardgame "Republic of Rome" in two-player mode. It's interesting, because although you're playing against "dumb" solitaire rules controlling the other factions, it still manages to produce a very tense and exciting game. The idea for doing Imperium originates in games of the Avalon Hill classic.

What about the ancient world makes it an attractive game setting for you?

I don't know if I consider it an attractive game setting as such. I enjoy ancient history, and that more than anything else drove my decision to do a Roman-style game. Another reason, perhaps, is my opinion that there is a lack of games providing a reasonable model of ancient warfare.

For example, consider "tech trees" in the ancient world. The pace of modern development makes such a game mechanism easy for us to accept, but it makes no sense in the ancient world. To put the issue in perspective, one need only observe that a Roman legionary of the Punic Wars time-travelling into the future would have been able to fight at no disadvantage on the German frontier four hundred years later. Despite this, almost every strategy game of the ancient world contains some form of tech trees.

I realized at some point that if I was ever going to have a chance of playing a strategy game of the ancient world the way I think it should be,I'd have to build it myself.

What has been the hardest part of the game design so far?

Striking the balance between complexity and simplicity. The AI has been a huge concern for me right from the beginning of the project, and it has been a factor in all of the major design decisions. Achieving a competent, non-cheating AI is really only possible if the game mechanics are simple.

Making it historically sensible and compelling to play at the same time, however, is no easy task.

Have you had to cut anything that you wish you had kept?

Not really. I have had to scale back on the diversity of government types in the version of the game I plan to release, but assuming the game has even a little success, I would hope to be able to support the game with some fairly frequent updates adding the extra governments. It's an approach that has been carried out pretty successfully with Stardock's "Galactic Civilizations", and has the added benefit of inhibiting piracy (who wants to hunt around for a new "cracked" version every other month?).

If there is anything I regret, it is probably that I haven't cut more. The project started out too big to begin with, and the long development time is a direct result of that. Developing and publishing the game in smaller increments right from the start would probably have been a better idea.

Is the decision to make the game turn-based rooted in personal preference, or are there practical reasons for going that way?

It is purely practical. Making a game real-time increases the demands on the graphical interface (lots more animation) as well as the complexity of the AI. Then you have the AI competing for CPU cycles with the graphics, and that invariably means that certain kinds of strategic analysis become impossible. Another is that real-time game mechanics opens up the window to all kinds of "gamey" strategies that an AI can hardly hope to emulate – for instance, consider the many subtle ways in which the precise timing of moves can be used to frustrate the AI in Europa Universalis. Real-time has its advantages, but compensating for its disadvantages would have added even more development time to what is already a pretty huge project..

One of the big draws for me is your attempt to make character and personality of generals and kings shape the game. How will this work?

One could define history as an account of events caused by generals and kings, and this is one of the basic ideas around which the game mechanics revolve. History doesn't just happen - it happens as a result of the actions of people.

In Imperium, the idea is that you get to control a group of these people (a faction). One of these will be your faction leader - essentially the player's avatar - and how your faction does depends a lot on his actions, and how the other characters react to them. There is a pretty rich personality model built into the characters, and though I will not have the
ressources to fully explore all the gameplay possibilities in there, I hope it will be possible to provide a pretty unique gameplay experience with it. I would like the player to (at least occasionally) forget the spreadsheet. I will have succeeded if the player upon considering Gaius Servilius Trebonius thinks "Do I dare send that cranky old git to Cilicia?" rather than "He's a 4-star general, excellent!".

The other aspect of the character model, is that they are my vehicle for driving the "historical narrative". I am not a big fan of event-based gameplay, and other than a little generic randomness (bad harvests and the like), there are going to be very few "historical events" in Imperium. Anything worth representing in the game can happen in regular gameplay, provided the right circumstances arise. For example, the great slave revolt of Spartacus is not coded to happen in 73 BCE - but slave revolts can happen anytime the slave population in a province gets high enough (poverty in the countryside helps as well), and there exist slave leaders with sufficiently high charisma and intelligence (to become more than just bandit chiefs). This of course sets the stage nicely for historical characters such as Eunus, Salvius and Spartacus.

Since historical characters tend to be born at historical times (unless one switches off this option), this means that the revolt of Spartacus probably will happen around 73 BCE - except, of course, if the conditions of the time make a major slave revolt unlikely. It also means that you could have some completely unknown (i.e., randomly generated) slave leader spark of the great slave revolts of the game. Essentially, the historical characters in the game are "personality-coded" to push the historical narrative in certain directions. But because they work within the framework of the game (rather than imposing changes from the "outside", as an event system tends to do), the historical narrative will hopefully maintain cohesiveness.

Has it been hard to get the word out about Imperium?

I don't think so. I can see that there are a fair amount of people following the development of the game, and considering I haven't done very much to bring them in (no flashy screenshots, for example), I am pretty content with the attention the game has got.

Where do you draw the line between historical simulation and history game?

I don't know that I actually draw much of a line anywhere. I guess it depends on how you define the two.

A simulation is by definition an abstraction of a real world situation, and a historical game is the same to me, except that you, as the player, can tweak the variables to see where it goes. Where historical games differ, is what aspects they have chosen to focus on in their simulation, and how conscentiously they deal with those aspects of the "simulation" that they are not focused on. Of course, it tends to be a problem that the abstractions chosen are often pretty poor from a simulation point of view - i.e., they lead to historically implausible outcomes even for the core game focus. But that is an entirely different issue.

Of course there are a (very) few games which are nothing more than a game mechanic dressed up in historical "clothing"; but I tend to not consider those as "history games"..

How have you managed the challenge of independent development?

I just try to do a little every day - even when I don't have time or enthusiasm for the work. That is really all there is to it.

Is it too early to get a general idea of the release time frame?

I do have some idea of when I would like the game to be done, but even after the game proper is done, there are still matters such as developing the final graphics, testing game balance and AI that need to be finished. Ask me again when the game has been signed with a publisher.

Diplomacy sliding south

Paradox's Diplomacy was released to initially positive reviews. Well, mostly positive. The scores tended to the mid-70 to 80 per cent range. A couple even hit the 90 range, including one from a veteran of the board game. The scores themselves don't quite reflect the generally respectful tone that the board game conversion gets in the text of the reviews.

But as the bigger publications have finally begun to weigh in, the scores have moved down the scale. CGW gives it one star. Gamespy only half a star. IGN hits it with 5/10. Still nothing from PCGamer, Gamespot or Gamesdomain. (My review in CGM will out in a few weeks.)

Why the move downward?

When the review copies were first sent out, the metaserver wasn't up yet so multiplayer had to be done through a LAN. This means that most of the opinions of the game were based on the single player mode or an atypical multilayer setup. Could the late arrival of the metaserver account for early good press? Unlikely. Diplomacy at its best is a multiplayer game.

Paradox generally gets good reviews for its games. It has cultivated a following among strategy gamers and strategy game reviewers for its attention to detail, devotion to its fan base and originality. But Victoria's reviews were fairly tepid (it got a mild endorsement from me) though there were fewer of them, so it's probably not fanboyism.

Is it that the later reviews (which are closer to my evaluation) are from people who have had a chance to spend more time with the game? Also doubtful since the problems with Diplomacy are pretty obvious from the opening few turns.

Once my review is published I will have more to say on Diplomacy and the press reaction to it. But the southward slide in review scores is a trend that could use a little more investigation.

A reply to my AI post

Now that Bruce Geryk has become a regular blogger as well as a regular reader of Portico, he has commented on a couple of my posts.

Be sure to read his new post. It's a reflection/reply to my recent thoughts on game AI in general and wargame AI in particular. He started chafing in the comments to that post, but thankfully he took the time to right down his thoughts in more detail.

As usual, he takes up the cudgel for Korsun Pocket and SSG. And, as usual, he may be on to something.

Artificial Whatsits

In a mostly grateful comment on my review of his Raging Tiger and Falklands War 1982, Curt Pangracs writes that I underrate the AI in those games when I refer to it as "lackluster".

A few days later, veteran wargame reviewer Jim Cobb writes an editorial on Combat Sim that accuses developers of not spending enough time or energy on the development of competent computer opponents. (Full disclosure: I owe Mr. Cobb a review of Blitzkrieg II that I *promise* to get around to very soon.)

The "lackluster AI" criticism I levy at the ATF games is, I admit, wargamer boilerplate. Hell, I suspect that the word "lackluster" is found more often in game magazines than in any other press form. As I explain in my reply to Mr. Pangracs, my more general point was that the AI seemed well able to handle the expected and obvious, but not the creative. Cobb's complaints about AI in are along similar lines, only he wants the AI to not just respond to creativity, but be capable of (or programmed to) surprise.

All of this raises the obvious question of what to expect in wargame AI. What makes an opponent believable?

There is one sector of wargaming opinion that holds that, since most real wargamers seek out human opponents, energy spent on the AI is wasted to begin with. To me, this puts the cart before the horse. If wargame AI was, in general, better, there would be less need or desire to seek out humans.

I have a more basic question, provoked by Pangracs' reply to my review. Do we know good AI when we see it? And should we believe what we are told by developers?

Really bad AI is easy enough to recognize. It was very common in early sports management sims, where opposing GMs would never challenge you for big free agents. Early wargames had computer opponents that had a good sense of the mathematic value of objectives, but poor sense of geography. The latest offering from Paradox, Diplomacy, has multiple AI opponents, none of whom are sharp enough to cut soft cheese.

When a game brags about its AI, it's never a good sign. The chaotically stupid Superpower games were promoted on their realism and "learning" opponent. Make a game complicated enough and it may appear that the AI is learning (people can convince themselves of anything) but even if the AI was good, the games are far too random to test how good.

But AI that ranges from OK to good is hard to detect. Most difficult computer opponents are just given more advantages. They "cheat" in order to provide a challenge. This is not greater intelligence, of course, so a challenging game is not a sign of a good AI.

Wargames AI seems easy to program. There are limited goals defined by the scenario. There are limited resources available and rarely a need to produce more (most "strategic wargames" like Grigsby's World at War are strategy games to me, not wargames). Include a combat resolution table or a sense of depreciating supply assets through a mathematical thingamajig and voila.

Apparently not so easy. Even in a wargame as simplistic as Rome: Total War's battles, the computer opponent can be easily convinced to prioritize its General's uber-power over the same unit's importance for the preservation of the army. Result: suicidal generals who are easily destroyed.

So what do we expect? An opponent that plays by the historical rules is fine, even though, as Cobb notes, any human opponent who did things purely historically would be beaten because you're not dumb enough to act historically when you attack him. A computer opponent who had more than one programmed opening and the good sense to know when stall an advance would work.

As I still struggle with Noble level in Civilization IV (I love games, but fear I'm not very good at them), I am reminded of one of the most enjoyable wargames I've ever played. Sid Meier's Gettysburg. I won't deny that it is more fun in multiplayer. Me and one of my MP arch-nemeses have many war stories to tell about the times he took a strong position on a hill or when I forced marched reinforcements through the woods to hit his rear. All great times.

But the computer opponent was more than acceptable. It seemed to know how to regroup, when to withdraw its guns and where to withdraw them to, could scout, would extend its line, would refuse its flanks in trouble...Sure, with practice I could beat it pretty soundly. But there was a lot of practice.

Does this mean that AI is not all that hard? Probably not. Meier probably had some tricks up his sleeves, or, like many gamers, I have chosen to believe something that is not exactly true.

So maybe we don't really need better AI. We just need to be fooled better.

Hearts of Iron II 1.3

Paradox has just announced the third patch for their hit WWII grand strategy game Hearts of Iron 2. They persist in calling these things "enhancements" instead of patches, which makes my skin crawl, but once again the Swedish masters continue to support some of their games well after release. (Victoria seems to have fallen by the wayside.)

The patch has dozens of little tweaks. I'm not sure the game needed more minister portraits, but it looks like the AI has gotten seriously examined in many setups. There are even some new events and triggers.

Will it be enough to persuade me to reinstall HoI2? Maybe.

The HoI games have never had the appeal to me that their other games have. As intriguing a period as the Second World War is, the grand strategy portion of the game is constricted by the time frame and the limits of the historical setup. Where even the mostly confounding Victoria feels like an historical playground, Hearts of Iron feels like the same game every time you play it - never a good idea for a genre where replayability equals reputation.

But it has been a long time since I've played Hearts of Iron II. There are enough changes in this patch to make me curious as to how it all turns out. And I've never played as Canada, and I should just to keep my Canuck cred. So I'll probably give it a spin sometime over Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, Crusader Kings is still stuck at 1.04a even though the new official patch was promised for the fall. And that's a game I know I like.

The Good and the Great

There is much to be learned in a comparison between Age of Empires III and Civilization IV. Both are highly anticipated sequels to legendary series. Both have had overenthusiastic preview press. Both have been mentioned many times on this blog. And both have consumed most of my gaming time in the last month or so.

But the difference in quality between the two games is astounding. Both are very good games and well worth the purchase price, I think. But plyaing Civilization IV is like discovering Civ for the very first time. Playing AoE 3 is like playing AoK again.

The differences between good and bad games are obvious. Even the line between good and average is pretty clear. (Well, one magazine gave Empire Earth 2 a near perfect score.) Since so many games fall into the bad/average/good troika that it is often easy to forget that a truly great game is a totally different experience than a merely good one - or a very good one.

What makes a game great? I could say, "Elves", but it's not elves exactly. For all the talk about magic and game gods and x-factors there has to be some way to express what makes one game so much more enjoyable than another.

At a cursory glance, Civ IV is just as familiar and threadbare as AoE 3 is - if not more. It hasn't been that long since Civ III Conquests came out and there have been other Civ-like games out there. The first Civ came out a very long time ago and the formula has been barely touched. The Age series at least has shifted in time and place. Civ is just the same stone age to space age thing repeated every few years.

And Civ III wasn't "great" - it was very good. Age of Mythology on the other hand was a really wonderful experience with a great variety of gameplay challenges. So, Civ looked like it was getting stale while Ensemble seemed to be hitting its creative stride.

But for some reason, Civ IV never fails to entertain. Every game I lose is as much fun as the games I win. Except for the terribly slow PBEM experience I'm going through, every turn is full with the immediate promise of something interesting about to happen.

In AoE 3, even as I play it over and over again, I keep asking myself why they didn't borrow more from other recent RTS games. Every spine-tingling moment of musket fire and cavalry charges is colored by the awareness that the subgenre has moved on and Ensemble hasn't seemed to notice - despite their own innovations in Age of Mythology.

But it's not just the issue of doing new stuff - which Civ IV has a lot of. As crazy as it sounds, I prefer both the look and sound of the turn based game to the glorious prettiness of Age 3. The triumph over simple art direction I guess. Better interface, better manual, better in game documentation...but this is all pretty mechanical stuff, isn't it? Shouldn't "fun" be something less easy to quantify?

It's not just the Civ formula - Activision's Call to Power series never quite did it for a lot of people even though it parroted a lot of the Civ stuff. I think most gamers have a soft spot for Meier and company - few other developers have so consistently satisfied our appetites. So maybe we subconsciously cut Firaxis a little slack. I doubt that's the case though.

There is a difference between good and great. It's the difference between Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate. Between Puresim Baseball and Out of the Park Baseball. Between F-19 Stealth Fighter and Red Baron. And it's different from genre to genre, case to case.

And it's the reason that I may not bother to buy another game this year.

I can't get a song out of my head

Not so long ago, I posted about how game music was mostly wasted on me. A lot of people love game soundtracks, but I usually turn them down or off and put on some Sondheim instead.

But now there is this African tune stuck in my head to the extent that I even bop my head as I think about it. The song is the opening tune in Civ IV and further evidence that Firaxis is full of terrible little trolls who think little of my valuable time.

First, I can't stop playing their game. Second, I can't stop thinking about playing their game. Third, I am humming a tune from their game.

Damn you, Soren Johnson.

Generations

Last night we had dinner with the neighbors. A very nice couple of our parent's generation. Both very accomplished, very gracious and, most importantly, very interesting.

And they find this whole computer gaming thing puzzling.

They've known that I had a little side income coming in from writing about this pastime, but tonight's discussoin went into a little more detail about what form our household entertainment hours generally took.

And they were shocked.

Not that we played games - they've known about my little side business for a while. But they were surprised at the variety of games out there and how they have become my household's primary form of entertainment.

There was some difficulty in explaining some of these games. Neverwinter Nights, with its combination of packaged software and user created content, is a mystery still I think. My description of historical strategy games and the possibilities they open up for creative game play intrigued them but certainly remains an abstraction for them in many ways.

There was none, however, of the knee-jerk doubting of games as legitimate pursuits for adults. My neighbors are the educated mainstream. And they ended the conversation by wondering if there was this little subculture side in their own children.

The conversation was, in a way, emblematic of the challenge facing gaming as a "mainstream" hobby. For those many thousands of people who were raised in a world without video gaming, the hobby is something they know next to nothing about. If we had said that we were into Korean cooking or coin collecting, there would have been much less to explain.

But the upside is that their questions were evidence of a sincere curiosity about gaming. I don't expect them to be loading Civ 4 onto their hard drives any time soon, but I do expect to have more of this conversation with them in the future.

I'm a big advocate of adult gamers being "out". The juvenalia that dominates the media on gaming (and sometimes the games themselves) can only be overcome by, to appropriate a religious term, "witnessing" about the power and possibility of gaming. I like to think that I made a little progress last night.

December Computer Games Magazine and dialogue

Great big issue this month with three reviews and one column by yours truly. Two of the reviews are bundled in the same spot, mostly because the two Armored Task Force wargames are pretty similar. The column is in the "Revisionist History" (now with PC games!) spot and waxes eloquently about the brief life of SimTex, the makers of the original Master of Orion. I'd like to thank my editor for some of that eloquence.

The big feature piece is on the union between board games and computer games. Bruce Geryk writes about how board games have made the transition to online play and Brett Todd contributes a companion piece on computer games that have found their way to cardboard and plastic. Well worth looking at.

There's an interesting pre-review of Civilization IV - not final because the game wasn't final when the piece went to press - but it describes how much Civ love I am feeling at the moment. It's interesting because the review format is Steve Bauman and Tom Chick engaging in a dialogue about the game. You don't just get a great sense of the game, you also get a very good idea about the subtle differences in these two gamers. Both come to the same conclusion - Civ IV is great - and mostly for the same features. But both also come through as people looking for different ways to love a great game.

It bears comparison with the "Bruce versus Tom" multiplayer reports in Computer Gaming World - reports that also serve as secondary reviews or even mini-strategy guides. (It may be the most consistently funny thing in the gaming press today - or at least the most consistently intentionally funny.)

Two voices on the same page actually works very well for conveying information and impressions, probably for the same reason that a well-run internet forum is more informative than a web review. For all its thumbnail sketches, Ebert and Roeper works as a movie show very well more because of the dialogue and enthusiasm than the thumbs and movie clips.

The original Gamesdomain is lamented for many reasons, but many people miss the "Second Opinions" pieces that some games would get. Dialogue and exchange is a natural part of evaluating any media product and I think that all of the major publishers and venues would be better served by doing it more often. PCGamer's podcast is an excellent example of gaming discussion done well. (I don't have G4TV, but what I have seen hasn't made its acquisition a high priority for me.)

Trash review

My review of the budget indie RTS Trash is now up at DIYGames.

It's games like Trash that make reviewing indies such a trial. It's only twenty dollars, so it's pocket change compared to most games. It's not as good as any large commercial RTS, and for obvious reasons. Money can't buy you a perfect game, but it buy you a lot of almost good-ness. Trash is a very good indie RTS.

So do you evaluate it based on its "objective" qualities, comparing it to all other RTS on the market and available to consumers, or do you just compare it to all other games with similar budgets and resources? Should an indie review site be like the minor leagues, pushing and promoting small developers through encouragement or should it be an advocate for the consumer - twenty dollars is almost half of a AAA title that will almost certainly have more replay and more options?

I settled on 3.5 stars because Trash is good for what it is - an old school RTS made on the cheap with a sense of style. But it wasn't an easy call.