On Site Review: Great Invasions

Great Invasions is the pseudo-sequel to Pax Romana, an overambitious, poorly executed, rushed out the door mess of a game with a few brilliant innovations. Great Invasions is not as bad as all that.

It's not brilliant either.

Set in the decline of the Roman Empire, GI charges the player with managing kingdoms, empires and religions as they rise and fall under internal and external pressure. There will be barbarian hordes, ambitious generals, saints, martyrs, heresies, and the rise of a new monotheism in the Middle East to challenge the dominance of Christianity. It is an exciting time frame for a game, and, unlike the better known and certainly bigger hit Total War: Barbarian Invasions, it takes its history very seriously.

In the History Fixed campaigns, this fidelity to history can be a little constraining. Revolts not only appear as they did historically, but vanish historically too. This means that you don't have to put too much effort into managing the historical troubles. You can focus on the ones caused by your own incompetence. There are Open and Fantasia campaigns available, but they lack a lot of the fascinating color that makes the game as illuminating as it can be.

The most interesting innovation of the game is that the player can control more than one power at once. In the Grand Campaign for example, the player can control both halves of the Roman Empire, the barbarian Franks and the Catholic Church. Each power has different goals, meaning that there is little risk that every game will play out the same even within the historical constraints. There is your standard economic/military game where you build and conquer, but if you control a faith, it is your job to convert heathens and kill heretics.

Like Pax Romana, the biggest failing of GI is the interface and documentation. When you give the player so much to do, he/she better be clear on what the priorities are. The 25 page manual is skimpy (though further documentation is available on the game's web site) and has too few images to make it obvious what the text is talking about. The tutorials are nearly useless, especially when the player moves from a four province babarian kingdom to a twenty province empire.

It's like staring at a menu in a restaurant where you can only afford the soup. You see all these choices in front of you, but there's no way to get at them. In this case, it's because you are afraid that you will set off a chain reaction of disasters that will undo whatever progress you have made.

Stability is enough of an issue that there have already been three and a half patches since the game was released in July. It is much better now, but far from perfect.

With dedicated study and hours of play, Great Invasions becomes a decent historical strategy game, but never more than that. The AI is listless in diplomacy and doesn't make many aggressive military maneuvers unless programmed to do so. The shorter campaigns are more enjoyable than the Grand Campaign, but don't have the epic feel that one of these games should have. The religious game would have been interesting all on its own, but sticking a military and economic game onto it just makes it feel like you are trying to do everything.

By allowing the player to control more than one nation/power, there is never any real down time to figure out what your priorities are. Just when you are getting a grip on the Saxons, you get an alert that something bad is happening to the Frisians. So you switch to them and manage that crisis while the Pope's missionaries are still stuck in Rome because you've been too busy to move them. Real time grand strategy in the Europa Universalis vein requires that the player always feel the pressure of time, but there should always be enough time to do what needs to be done. Slowing down the time compression or pausing helps some, but you never really escape the feeling that you are herding cats.

The "governor" mechanic is never adequately explained, much of the art and the stratagem game device are holdovers from Pax Romana and for a game with so many historical figures it has a shocking lack of personality.

Lead designer Philippe Thibault designed the Europa Universalis board game and had a role in the first computer translation - the game that made Paradox Studios one of the most prominent developers of historical strategy games ever. Thibault's games show immense design ambition and his titles' obvious resemblance to the Paradox games overshadows some real conceptual originality, be it the political minigame in Pax Romana or the multi-nation management of Great Invasions.

Not yet available in America, Great Invasions is developed by Indie Games and published by Nobilis. If you don't mind reading the manual in French, you can order it directly from the Nobilis website.

Legion: Arena is gold

Slitherine's next ancient strategy game, Legion: Arena has gone gold. It can be pre-ordered now from their website and will be released October 21.

My enthusiasm for this game was tempered a bit by the underwhelming IGN previews and the news that there would be no battle generator. But, with over 100 scenarios and their best engine yet, I am excited again.

I'll confess to being a sucker for the material. I'll read, watch and play almost anything with an ancient vibe. I even watched the execrable ABC miniseries Empire. The only more enjoyable than a good sword & sandal movie is a bad one, after all. This doesn't work for games; a bad game is a bad game and you can't take much zeal in the ludicrous when it's taking up time you can spend on a good game.

With a 39.99 asking price, it's ten dollars cheaper than Age of Empires 3 and appeals more to my sensibilities. Though Slitherine's games to date have been pretty average, I keep following them because I have a feeling that someday they will surprise me.

Here's hoping that October 21 brings a surprise.

Chris Crawford in The Escapist

This week's Escapist has an interview with the legendary game developer Chris Crawford. The man behind strategy classics Eastern Front '41 and Balance of Power sits down with Max Steele to mostly discuss Crawford's timeless theme - why games suck.

Well, that's a bit of an oversimplification. He admits to not playing games much anymore. He is still talking about his Erasmotron virtual-person simulator and has nice things to say about the interactive story Facade. His disillusionment dates from the time that Computer Gaming World said that his educational decison making game Balance of the Planet was artistic, but not a lot of fun.

Crawford is squarely in the games are serious business camp. They should be used to tell us more about ourselves and our world. Look at his classic flop Trust and Betrayal - it's all about human dynamics in a system of imperfect information. Lots of game theory stuff in it, actually. Balance of Power was about how attempts to press an opponent into a corner could lead to mutual annhiliation.

Crawford is one of those game analyst/philosophers that I'm not sure how to approach from the vantage point as a gaming enthusiast. It's all well and good to say that games shouldn't just have to be fun, but they should at least be compelling.

As much as he thinks Facade is a step forward, I think it's a step sideways. The game is still programming likely responses to a range of player behavior; it's not really dynamic interaction and as a story, it's not very interesting. I can appreciate the technology and programming involved in Facade and how it might lead to gaming as a story telling device, but it's not close yet.

His complaints about the critical reception to Balance of the Planet underscore what, I think, Crawford's position on games as entertainment is:

Here we have an acknowledgement that Balance of the Planet is some kind of art, yet the review refuses to endorse it because it isn't fun! ...perhaps our reviewer would react to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony like this: "Gosh, Mr. Beethoven, your symphony made my heart soar in awe at the majesty of the universe, but you know, it's just not fun. We need some tunes we can dance to, or catchy jingles we can snap our fingers to.

I take issue with anyone who doesn't think that Beethoven's Ninth is one of the most fun pieces of music ever written, but I think this comment from a 1997 essay by Crawford suggests that, for him, games are supposed to be good for you. Uplifting, thought-provoking, soul-touching things. Where games are, like most music, disposable culture to the extreme, Crawford wants them to be more.

All I can say is "Ecce ludi". Behold the games. They are all around you. The Sims touches my heart on a regular basis, even when I am making them do something naughty. Has there ever been a role playing game as uplifting as Planescape: Torment? There is all kind of meaningful story telling going on in games, but you just have to look to see it.

Crawford is falling for the old trap that because something is not dressed up as a SERIOUS EXERCISE it cannot have serious consequences. A game can be "fun" (whatever that means) and still instruct or inspire.

This assumes that instruction or inspiration are goals that games can achieve. I know no one that isn't touched by the beauty of Beethoven's Ninth, but lots who can't (or won't) identify with the everyday problems of Sims, or who think Baldur's Gate a silly place no matter how many demands are placed on a demigod. Because of the interactive nature of games, it is very difficult to gauge how people respond to them. Games have proven uneven teachers of content and, in my experience, if you allow outrageous behavior then players will do it, whether it be wiping out thousands of animals with no penalty in Oregon Trail or tower rushing your "ally" in Age of Empires.

In sum, I'm not sure what Crawford wants. His self-imposed exile from the industry (I'm sorry I never got to see his now legendary "Dragon Speech") has, I think, led to a stasis in his thinking about what games are for. Were he to attend the Serious Games Summit in Washington, DC next month, I think he would see that simulations and decision trees are being put to good use in institutional circles. Even a guru has to stay current. Sometimes you have to leave Walden.

Barbarian Invasion ships

The expansion to last year's best strategy game ships today. Rome: Total War - Barbarian Invasion moves the game into the fall of the empire and introduces religion as a controlling factor. The Senate is gone and rebellions can lead to civil wars, representing the instability of both the Eastern and Western Roman domains.

This is the first game about the decline of the empire to go into wide internation release, though the last year or so has seen this period represented in a number of smaller European titles. Fall of Rome is an online only multiplayer game that has been widely acclaimed, though I haven't had the chance to try it myself. Great Invasions 350-1066 is the sequel to the disappointing Pax Romana. Expect an on-site review some time in the next couple of weeks. Against Rome was launched by JoWood in late 2003 but still hasn't found its way to North America.

Despite the dramatic nature of the collapse of the great Mediterranean empire - at least in the West - the fall of Rome has never had the same pull on game designers that its rise has. Attila is at least as compelling an historical figure as Hannibal, and Belisarius as great a general as Caesar. The accompanying rise of Christianity as a religion and the struggles over dogma makes an intriguing subplot - one that Creative Assembly is handling by assigning religions to the Roman generals. A pagan governor in a Christian town is likely to cause offence. (You will find that one of the first steps to keeping order is to raze any temple that gets the population upset.)

Part of the pull is that conquering is always more fun than merely holding things together. Rome has to be big but weak in order to make a "Fall" scenario remotely accurate, and seeing all your generals make a grab for the throne is a great way to frustrate a player. You have to provide incentives for the player to control the barbarian hordes, even though their level of "civilization" is pretty low and there isn't the variety of units or tactics open to you as a metropole dwelling Roman. Great Invasions tries to get around all of this by allowing you to control institutions like the Church or letting the player manage more than one power at once - clever, but not entirely successful.

My further opinions on Barbarian Invasion will be available on this site before the end of the week.

Age of Empires III date set

Age of Empires III will be released to American consumers on October 18. A Collector's Edition will be available for $69.99 and comes with all the useless stuff that people cram into these editions. A book of concept art, a "making of" DVD, a super special manual, etc.

I'll buy it, mostly because everyone else will and the best part of gaming is the early day sharing of likes and dislikes. The demo disappointed me on so many levels, though, that I'm not excited about shelling out the fifty bucks to stay on top of things.

This, however, is one of the major strategy titles of the year. This isn't a marginal game, like Legion: Arena - a game I am, at this point, much more interested in seeing than a retro-feeling Age game. But not playing it would be like being a movie critic who never saw Casablanca.

After all, there is still a chance that this game could end up on somebody's Best of 2005 list. After all, GameSpy picked the first Empire Earth as its game of the year for 2001 and it wasn't all that great.

Chat chat

I am in the process of reviewing a strategy game that is all about the multiplayer. Its setup, premise and design emphasize that the game is meant to be played with and against other people. It also has one major oversight that has the potential to cripple its multiplayer base. No chat.

Since I'm still in the evaluation stage, I'll leave the game unnamed. Plus, my explicit opinions on the game are the property of someone else for the moment. But the omission of such a standard interface tool is jaw-droppingly mad.

I've played a lot of terrible games - many with tiny budgets. War Times has a chat option. Pax Romana does, too. It is such a basic multiplayer tool that wargames like The Falklands War: 1982 use it. The prospect of playing any game with a multiplayer component without a chat tool is almost too ridiculous to imagine. Hell, Literati has chat.

And its not like the developer in questions is new. They've been around for a few years and have a nice stable of games to their credit. All had chat.

In what circumstances would you not want the players to communicate via a chat interface? Is it conceivable that you would not want players to interact? If a game can only have two players and they are locked in a duel to the death from the moment the game begins, you might be able to get away with tossing chat. You wouldn't be able to taunt your enemies, but you always have the postgame for that. But when a game gets bigger than two people, not including chat cuts off the possibility of diplomacy and coordination.

Maybe you don't want your players to work together. If a game is designed as a purely solo, survival of the fittest, Darwin on steroids type of strategy game then you could probably justify the choice on pure game design merits.

Information wants to be free, though, so players will get frustrated if they can't trade intelligence or offer support against the big dog in town. Even if a game is set up as last man standing, chat allows the weaker player (usually me) to buy time through persuasion and puppy-dog eyes.

The game in question must have been designed without chat for a good reason, but I'll be damned if I can think of it. Any game designers want to help me out here? When is communication between players something you choose to design out?

Modding Civ IV

Shacknews has a note from Firaxis' Barry Caudill and screenshots that reveal a little more about the world building tool that we will see in early 2006. Not only will the Python and XML scripting be wide open to Meier-wannabes, but the Civ IV SDK will be made available allowing for some pretty deep changes to the way the game plays, if you so desire.

The world builder screenshots look pretty straightforward, but they always do. I've always had little patience for my own creativity. Despite my rational nature, I don't usually create in the logical mode that true mod-making demands. But the news that I can introduce new civilizations to the game through the editor is great, so I expect to have my Canadians up and running the world sometime in February. (I haven't chosen the leaders yet...maybe Trudeau and Macdonald. Maybe King.)

Anyway, the delayed release of the mod kit is frustrating for many Civ-heads, but at least we are getting some news about it.

Did you ever wonder...?

I recently finished an article for Computer Games Magazine for their Revisionist History column (now with PC games!). Part of it dealt with innovations, contributions, that sort of thing. Because, as an amateur historian, the origins of things really interest me. I'm not talking about the first RTS, or the first hex based wargame that was not derived from a board version. I mean the basic approaches to game design and game mechanics.

Computer games are full of little things that have become so common that we sometimes forget what the world was like before they were invented. Do people remember that in the first Civilization, for example, that there were no real differences between the races? Maybe the Babylonians would start with an extra settler every now and then, but the idea that factions should have distinct characteristics was not accepted as standard. Civ III gave each civ two characteristics, Civ IV will change the characteristics based on the leader.

What was the first strategy game that integrated a tactical battle mode with a grand strategic overlay? Centurion: Defender of Rome maybe?

Who was the genius who decided that left clicking would be for selecting and right clicking for moving? What about context sensitive right clicking? Drag select?

Which game had the first tech tree? Was Dune 2 the first game that had unique units, but not completely unique armies? Which game had the first unique armies? What about infinite resource points? Do they date before Cossacks?

Origin stories are inherently interesting to me. It is easy to trace the RTS legacy from Herzog Zwei to Rise of Nations or the 4x path from Empire through Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires to the more common real time games we have today. But it is often the little stuff in design that separates the good from the great. The influence of Rise of Nations on Empire Earth 2 is everywhere though the former is much better because EE2 missed the point of borders or automated resource collection.

I hope to explore some of these issues and questions, but would appreciate suggestions of more questions or even answers. If you feel up to it, some of you could even write a guest post on one of these questions.

(I'm always open to guest posts, by the way. Provided they are PG, intelligent and mostly about strategy and war games, I'd love to host other people's ramblings.)

Why I am a philistine

Right up there with "Scariest game?" and "Worst Ending?", "Favorite Game Music" is a perennial topic on game forums the world over. And it is one of the many topics on which I have no firm opinions. I am probably one of the few serious gamers who doesn't care about music in a game.

Yeah, they have real composers now. Some of the stuff may be quite nice at setting an atmosphere - especially in role playing games. But most of the time it isn't. And there is usually nothing memorable about music in strategy games.

Not that they don't try. It's just that it all sounds the same to me. There is either an overly bombastic classical score (like the Paradox games) or poorly written mood music that loops over and over again (check any RTS).

What passes for music in many games is, fact, a series of sound cues. "Here is where you feel excited!" "Here is where you triumph!". It's like those organ players at stadiums who tell you when to cheer. This isn't different from any soundtrack, of course, but it would help if the musical cues were more creative or interesting than the random tunes I can find on the Internet or my CD shelf. I know people who listen to game music as music; I mostly turn it down or off and put in what I want to listen to.

When I play Children of the Nile, I'd much rather have Aida in the background. Random Broadway tunes beat most sci-fi strategy music, almost all of which is some pseudo-techno synth music with Star Trek sounds. I can't think of any occasion in which the score to Total War is better than Spirit of the West or The Tragically Hip.

All this makes me somewhat less than human, I suspect. Music is the food of love and all that jazz. And I'm sorry that the efforts of the game composers is lost on me. But if I can't turn your music off, your game will have one more hurdle to overcome with me.

Meet the competition

There is a new wargaming blog that everyone interested in the topic should check out. Bruce Geryk will be writing a new wargaming column for Computer Gaming World and, to that end, has been given blog space on 1up.com.

My post title is, of course, a joke. Bruce is not competing with my blog, nor mine with his. Mine is more general strategy gaming (with some forays into gaming journalism and other issues) where his will be dedicated to wargames. I love wargames, but don't play nearly as many as I used to. He's twice the writer I am, too.

But if there is any opinion on wargames I take seriously, it's Bruce Geryk. In fact, he is one of a handful of gaming writers whose work I will actively seek out. So it is very exciting to have him blogging on a semi-regular basis.

Much of the content will be expanded forms of his columns, I think, but I hope he feels free to move beyond that share his wider opinions on the state of the hobby.

Civ 4 coming in stages

As exciting as the news of an October release of Civ IV was, the recent Gamespot preview has thrown a kink into my enthusiasm. Jason Ocampo reports that the Pit Boss persistent server will not be up until December and the mod kit unavailable until January.

So, already, two of the much hyped reasons to anticipate this iteration of Civ are already weakened. Whatever multiplayer does come out of Firaxis at the end of October, it will not be fully in place for another six to eight weeks - this after assurances that multiplayer variations would be integral to the design of the game. Most of the previews have mentioned how open Civ IV will be to the mod community, but that too will have to wait.

Based on my limited time with single play Civ, I still think the game will excite the mind and delight the senses. And some multiplayer functionality will be available by the release date. But this news raises fears of another Play the World debacle where features, introduced at later dates, don't work as advertised.

Strength and Honour finally out

After at least two years of development - it was an entry in the IGF in 2004 - Magitech's ancient strategy game Strength and Honour is available in North America. They had trouble securing a publisher in Canada and the US, despite selling the game to publishers in Australia, Poland, China, Russia, Spain and Italy. Did I mention that Magitech is a Canadian company? That explains the spelling of "honour" if not the trouble they had getting the game on shevles.

Strength and Honour is only available directly from the company, and for the standard retail game price of $49.99. That's a lot of money for a game they couldn't get anyone to publish, but not completely out of line.

I'm surprised that Matrix Games, a reliable and devoted ally of small and solo developers didn't get their hands on this game. They certainly would have helped get the word out. Gamespot didn't mention the change in status. Nor did Gamespy. Nor IGN.

To help my countrymen along, here's my little bit to remind those of you that have already forgotten about this game. Once I get my hands on a copy, I'll pass along my opinion.

Aliens suck, or Why I don't dig sci-fi strategy

My game shelf is bulging with strategy and war games. Well over a third of my collection is strategy of one form or another, from tactical combat games like X-Com to RTS staples like Age of Empires to half forgotten titles like Joan of Arc: Siege and Sword. And of these, very few are science fiction. I only have one of the Master of Orions. I never got around to Galactic Civilization in any of its forms. I have Starships Unlimited and the X-Com games, but not Space Empires - any of them. And as I cruise Ebay trying to fill out my game collections, my eyes are usually drawn to Harpoon II or Centurion.

I like science fiction in general. I used to read a lot of it. I've certainly read and watched more sci-fi than I have fantasy. No cable TV means that I'm the only nerd on the planet who hasn't gotten wrapped up in the new Battlestar Galactica. I'd probably watch it, too. Much of my grad school weekend schedule revolved around Babylon 5 or the final seasons of ST: TNG. But, for all the sci-fi I used to consume, I find it (and much fantasy literature for that matter) less surprising and exciting than the history that I read and write.

As a strategy game setting, conquering planets was never as thrilling as mining them in Starfleet. Designing and building starships wasn't as much fun as flying them in Tie Fighter or Wing Commander. Even the technically best of the Sid Meier 4x games, Alpha Centauri, was not played as heavily as either Civ II or Colonization - the latter a much inferior game in many important ways. But at least SMAC used human factions with human motivations; the expansion introduced aliens so I didn't even bother with it. I even prefer medieval fantasy strategy games like Kohan or Warlords to any Starcraft or Total Annihilation.

This explains the bias on this blog towards historical strategy games instead of science fiction ones. But where does this bias come from? I think that my heavy youthful diet of sci-fi may be part of the problem. Most science fiction novels or programs revolve around personalities instead of powers. For all the talk of the Federation in Star Trek or the Minbari in B5, both series were primarily about individuals shaping the world around them. History books and programs, on the other hand, more often emphasize the larger forces that push people in one direction or another. History is often the story of the rise and fall of empires; sci-fi is often the story of the rise and fall of an individual.

But this is only a tiny part of the picture. More of it is that I have trouble visualizing my aliens and alien equipment as mine. I can't identify with Space Cargo Trader V as well as I can with the archers I've just sent over that hill. I find it easier to take on the role of a high elf general with mostly historic troops than I do the Klackons, or whatever made up name Alien Race Sigma is given. A common complaint about the great Alpha Centauri is that the technology names never made much sense. I know what a "wheel" is. "Matter editation" just looks like a misspelling.

So, I'm in no hurry to play Admiral of Starfleet when there are more human problems to deal with. Catching a Venusian Flu doesn't have the pull of the Plague - a real life catastrophe that I can comprehend on an historic level and as a likely game mechanic. An army of Cossacks slaughtering my peasants grabs me in a way that a zerg rush never will. The most beautiful Protoss ending ever conceived pales before the time that an American sub got in the middle of my Soviet fleet in Harpoon and sunk eight ships before I knew what was happening.

Does this obvious bias make it hard for me to play, or review, sci-fi strategy? It does mean that I have a cleaner palate. But it also means that I can't appreciate how one sci-fi game is derived from another. I can give a learned discourse on the portrayal of the French in historical strategy games, but I doubt I can compare the Sim-UNs in MOO or GalCiv and sound like I know what the hell I'm talking about. Strategy games are strategy games, in many ways, so it wouldn't take me long to get up to speed. But I'm man enough to admit my weaknesses and preferences.

Gamer's Quarter 3

The third volume of The Gamer's Quarter is now available at their website. There have been eleven issues of The Escapist since the second volume of GQ came out.

As I browse GQ3, it hits me why I can't fall in love with this web magazine no matter how much I want to. It's not just because Amandeep Jutla's attack on Starcraft doesn't make a lot of sense to me (it's not my favorite game either, but I don't get the hate, nor do I think it is solely responsible for why he hates PC games). And it's not because the comics just don't work - few comics do.

It's because it's too damn big.

I'm an agnostic on the whole "New Games Journalism" thing. As a blogger as well as a minor appendage suckling on the teat of old games journalism, I appreciate the importance of gamers sharing their gaming experiences. Reviews are usually just more formal versions of the type of stuff that NGJ is. NGJ is a more personal recording of reactions to games. Like all writing, it can be good or it can be bad.

But, like all writing, you can also say enough already. And over a hundred pages of the stuff is too much. This edition has some game design stuff, including a daring suggestion that an RPG could have no saves. But many of the articles just go on and on - the Starcraft article being a good example.

I will keep reading it - likely in small doses at a time - and will keep pointing to its updates. I am excited about the opportunities that these type of web publications are providing to some interesting people with some interesting perspectives. It could use a little more editorial control - maybe firmer word limits? - but that would almost go against the whole philosophy of the mag.

Oh, and the new Escapist is out, too.

What should an expansion pack expand?

As hard as it is to believe, there haven't always been expansion packs. Every now and then a sports game would put out a stadium disk or roster patch, but the early 90s were largely bereft of such cash grabs. The first expansion I can remember being excited about was the Campaign Disk for SSI's Age of Rifles (1996), and it only added some campaigns and some random combat options. Not exactly thrilling.

Now, it seems, every major strategy release gets an expansion pack. A lot of minor strategy titles get them, too. I've been heavily playing two new expansions over the weekend (stay tuned for comments at a later date) and have been mostly underwhelmed by both. They are aren't bad games at all. In fact, if either was included as part of the original game they would have made it even better.

But it raises the question of what expansion packs are for. What makes one a success and one a failure? Note that by "failure" I am not judging the games by sales. Any Sims expansion will sell a million copies whether it is as good as Hot Date and Unleashed or as lame as Superstar or Making Magic. By "failure" I mostly mean "Was this worth my money? Has this changed the game for the better?" So by failure, I mostly mean "Did it fail me and my petty expectations?"

Hey, gaming is very personal.

A good comparison is the two expansions for the two best RTS of the last few years - Rise of Nations and Age of Mythology. RoN expanded with Thrones and Patriots. It gave the player six new civilizations, new wonders and four new campaign maps. It integrated seamlessly into the RoN game world. The campaigns were excellent and breathed new life into a game mode that was not very replayable after the third or fourth time.

Age of Mythology had the Titans expansion. Lots of new stuff here, too. A new (if short) campaign, a new superweapon, and a new faction (Atlantis) with new gods. This meant new god powers, some of which would regenerate over time. But the whole package was a lot less compelling than what RoN had to offer.

In many ways, AoM is a superior game. Ensemble had to balance not only four wildly different factions, but also 48 different deities. The rock/paper/scissors stuff was doubly cyclical since you not only had units and their counters, but the hero/myth/mortal dynamic as well. And it works. Regenerative god powers was a neat concept and the Titans looked cool.

I'm not alone in my opinions here, either. Though the Gamerankings differences are negligible (Thrones gets 88, Titans 85) , Gamespot, Computer Gaming World and Computer Games Magazine all had the Rise of Nations expansion ahead by a comfortable margin. Gamespot had different reviewers for each (Jason Ocampo for Thrones and Greg Kasavin for Titans) while CGW and CGM had the same guy cover both (Di Luo and Tom Chick, respectively).

Don't get me wrong, Titans is not a bad expansion. It's hard to imagine what a bad expansion even is, since where gaming is concerned, more is usually better. It is not, however, as good as Thrones.

Why not? Well, the Atlanteans are not a compelling race. Their gods are simply an older Greek pantheon and so lack added exoticism. Ensemble didn't want to introduce gods that most players would be unfamiliar with (how many gamers know their Sumerian gods? Maybe Aztec? How about Chinese?) but the result was a feeling that these new people were just more extras from a sword and sandal movie. The titan superweapon meant that almost every game ended the same way and whoever got the titan out first would usually win. The Atlantean counter-unit specialists made the RPS concept more transparent, but the battles more annoying. In some ways, the expansion took some of the mystery and fun out of a game that I really, really like.

Rise of Nations integrated the new stuff perfectly. There was never a sense that you were playing against a race that hadn't been planned from the beginning. The new racial powers were quite powerful but did nothing to overwhelm or diminish the assets that the orignial cultures brought the table. Though, empircally, Thrones added more stuff it did less to change the fundamental game. It expanded; it didn't rebuild.

This can't be seen as a hard and fast rule, though. Take the Conquests expansion for Civ III. The chilly reception that greeted the original game (at least in some quarters) was almost completely destroyed by the rapturous applause that resulted from Conquests. Some of this joy, undoubtedly, was spurred by bugged and disappointing Play the World expansion, but for many Conquests made Civ a whole new game. The Bioware RPGs have expansions that usually introduce new campaigns as long as the originals. The best of the Sim expansions do more than add new material, they add new worlds and life options for your dolls, sometimes radically changing the game (Hot Date and Sims 2 University did this.) Cossacks had two expansions, and neither added anything of note beyond a couple of new European armies.

So, as usual, no answers here. Feel free to fill the comments with reflections on the best and worst of expansion packs.

PC Gamer Podcast with Meier

In case you haven't checked it out, PC Gamer magazine (the US version) has a podcast now. It's not bad, as far as these things go. Knowledgeable people talking knowledgeably about computer games and the like. Sure, they may review a game a month before it even goes gold, but you don't get to be the number one computer gaming magazine in the country by knowing nothing.

The third edition of the podcast has the usual stuff talking about games, violence and Hot Coffee (aren't we tired of this topic yet?). The best thing from my vantage point was the interview with Sid Meier. Not a lot of new information in the interview, but it does give a look at what Firaxis is trying to accomplish with Civilization IV. There is a little glimpse into the design process at Firaxis and further insight into the place of console gaming in Firaxis's future. There's a lot of discussion about the mod possibilities for Civ IV, something that is intended to be much easier for both the developers and consumers.

I think there should be more gaming podcasts. Video Game News has one, and Poweruser.TV has a general science/tech podcast that often deals with gaming. All three of these are now on my regular listening queue. It is actually surprising how well game discussion - dealing with a very visual and tactile medium - translates to aural and literal forms. Game reviews are always more words than pictures, so the move to radio broadcast isn't as cumbersome as one would think.

Paradox Pre-Order Contest

One more reason to get excited about the imminent release of Diplomacy from Paradox. Anyone who preorders the game from their online shop has a chance at some pretty cool prizes.

First prize is a weekend in Stockholm hanging out with the development team. You get a behind the scenes look at how the kings of ambitious gaming produce their product and a night partying with Swedes. Plus a day to look around one of Europe's great cities.

Second prize is a German hat; one of those spiked ones you see in all the old war movies. Third prize is a German sword with scabbard. (Why all the German stuff? Is this just easier to come by? Why not a Cossack hat?)

There will also be ten consolation prizes - Paradox medals. I've already got one of those.

If you were on the edge of pre-ordering Diplomacy, this could be your chance to wow your friends with talks about the beauty of Sweden or with your cool new headgear. Contest ends when Diplomacy hits shelves the first week of October.

Culture Bombs

Gamespy has a report on the multiplayer component of Civlization IV. Dave Kosak is writing about an event that I had the good fortune to attend. My reflections on MP Civ and the game in general should be in an upcoming issue of Computer Games Magazine.

Dave explains in pretty good detail the "culture bomb" strategy that we reporters were introduced to. You build an artistic wonder of the world, it generates a Great Artist, you walk the great master to a puny border city and put him to work there. All of a sudden, your tiny town gets thousands of points in culture and foreign cities are clamoring to join your enlightened empire. As Dave puts it, "It's as if Michelangelo painted the roof of the Sistine Chapel in Podunk, New Jersey, and it became the hottest City in the Northeast."

The instant I heard about this strategy I thought it was a little cheap. I like the idea of culture flipping since it's a route to expansion that doesn't involve a lot of guns or threats. It's not clear if an opposing culture bomb can be dropped to bring the defecting cities back or if the AI will be able to deal with such a strategy. My time with the game was almost all in multiplayer (I started a few single player games in between sessions, but never got very far) and the game was still being tweaked anyway.

The more I think about the game though, the less concerned I am since the Great Person mechanic gives lots of ways to influence your enemies. Religion could be very powerful if you can convert a fontier town to your one true faith. There are lots more wonders now, so the culture wars can get intense even without Leonardo setting up in Nipissing. Until my preview is published, I can't elaborate too much on this (there's lots of other info online) but I can say that Civ IV could be the one of the best strategy games of the year. And I'm one of the people who wasn't sure it should be made in the first place.

If culture bombs aren't easily countered (everybody who reads Gamespy knows about them now) or aren't tweaked (maybe a minimum size city limit?), the early game could be a Parthenon Rush. Every Civ game had ideal build orders, but if everyone starts the game by trying to get Phidias to Argos before your enemy can send Schiller to Munich, it might get a little annoying.

Getting Discovered

I spent most of today with a camera and production crew for the new Discovery Channel show Dr. Know. It's sort of a medical version of Mythbusters. I was chosen to represent the typical heavy computer user; someone who spends a lot of time starting at a monitor, and who is known to play games for hours at a time without much rest. The idea was to find out if prolonged exposure to monitors (or televisions) could do harm to the human eye.

The crew and staff were very professional TV people, but I think I learned more about television production than I should have if I ever wanted to see the industry as some sort of magic.

First, they weren't really that interested in capturing the real me. The science is the star of the show. I was just a prop. My responses weren't scripted, but I was prodded to do things with and at my computer that I never would in real life. Any gamer who sees the episode (sometime in 2006) will notice them immediately. I put up a bit of a fight when they wanted to see me pretend to use the computer in the bathroom, but, they reminded me, they want to keep the show light and a little exaggeration makes the point better than me holding forth about my regular habits.

Second, television production is boring. It was to me at least. Take after take after take. Look here, don't look there. We went to an opthamologist's office and I spent most of the time sitting reading magazines, since I was only needed for a couple of brief shots.

In short, the whole day will be edited down to a few minutes. I knew this was likely. I'm no pollyanna. So why do it? I was asked to. My day was free. I haven't been on TV since my high school quiz team a decade and a half ago. Mostly, I thought it would be interesting to see how these light science programs are made.

I'll let you all know when the episode airs.

Round Table Post: Genre Blending for Good

One of the challenges in this month's gaming blog roundtable is to take a flawed game and suggest how it could be improved through melding with other genres. This is the challenge that I have taken up. [click on read more for the full deal]

Strategy games in general are genre crossers. Any flight or subsim with a dynamic campaign has a strategic componet - some very explicitly (Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe). Sports management sims are really business strategy games, and now many action sports titles have "franchise modes." The Celtic Kings series from Haemimont tried to include role-playing elements, but the first was mostly an adventure game in its "campaign mode." We even have an action-RTS on the way (Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War). Has any fantasy strategy game strayed very far from the D&D worldview?

Still, some titles try to ape a similar game and neglect the possibilities beyond their own stated genre. Take the so-flawed-it-hurts Pax Romana. This ancient world strategy game from Galilea by way of Dreamcatcher tried to be Europa Universalis with togas. A big map, lots of diplomatic options, different trade goods, abstracted battles - you could tell that the lead designer worked on the original version of the Paradox classic. The use of "stratagems" (think special power cards) was a minor innovation and has been carried on almost unchanged into Great Invasions.

It also had an excellent political minigame. You would lead a faction in the Republic (divided into anachronistic groups) and campaign for office. There was an effort to balance the prize of political triumph since repeated victories would send your successful candidates overseas to lead armies, depleting political strength at home.

There was never any real identification with your almost faceless horde of backbenchers. They had political and military skills, but you never really had much of an idea who these people were. They had names, of course, but little else. You would play a "wedding" stratagem to convert an enemy to a friend, but there was no real union between the two of you. The senators and equites you courted were little more than chits with different values attached. The factions had marginal differences between them (plutocrats got more money, for example) but there was never a sense that this political game had much connection to what was happening in Rome.

What Pax Romana needed was more role playing. Instead of a faction, you would play a family navigating the treacherous waters of the Forum. You wouldn't necessarily be committed to a faction with set policy; your strength and weakness would depend on how well you and your successors could adapt to the changing demands of the people, the merchants and the army.

Would this work? Look at Crusader Kings. CK is really a role playing strategy game. You have real characters and real families. Greedy vassals hate you because you are honest. Bastard step-children plot against you and your heirs. Crazy relatives start killing people. Now take this role playing and make player success contingent on winning wars to boost popularity, or forging marriage links to ensure electoral success.

The great weakness of the political game in Pax Romana was the sameness of it all. Playing Caesar felt no different from playing Scipio. It didn't matter who the faction leader was, especially since you could easily raise enough legions to trump any military weakness in your generals. Differences between orators and commanders melted away.

In my review of Knights of Honor (CGM July 2005, p.62) I wrote: "If game designers want to personalize decision making, they should give the decision makers personality." Why bother naming the politicians at all if they turn into the same person after a while? The D&D class system is an effort to draw stark lines between character types. In CK, a duke or king with a poor military rating will make the player more reluctant to send him into battle. In Supreme Ruler 2010, your ministers have ideologies that may make them skeptical of your decisions. In Rome: Total War, the piling on of retinue and attributes combine to create a three-dimensional image of a son known only as Lucius the Mad.

Would this be easy to do? No. The already kludgy grand strategy game might have to be further simplified. The entire game shift would be from the "conquer the world" mode to the "accumulate fame and prestige" mode. Considering how few people had anything kind to say about the strategy component of Pax Romana, this might not be a bad thing.

Would this have been enough to save Pax Romana from obscurity and disdain? Likely not. The interface was terrible, the documentation inadequate and the stability absent. Most of this was the result of a rushed release, but some was just poor design.

Would it make the game better? I think so. For many of us fascinated by ancient history, the general rise and fall of great powers is less interesting than the characters who made it so. Would anyone care about Carthage if it weren't for the towering genius of Hannibal? The fall of the Republic is such a compelling time period because we feel we know Caesar and Pompey and Cicero and my old pal Cato Uticensis. By letting the player bend the Mediterranean to his/her will with realistic characters instead of generic chits, Pax Romana could have made this world come alive.

New York Times gets it right

Today's New York Times had their annual "upcoming art season" section - a listing of movie releases, theater productions and television programs for this fall and winter. It's a good way to start the fall, in my opinion. I can't bother to keep up with all the new movies coming out, and it's not like there is a lot of reliable preview coverage of the Broadway season in the Washington Post.

And there it was. On page 92. Seth Seischel had a preview of games of note that will be released in the next few months.

Usually relegated to a technology or even business section of newspapers, it was nice to see games being given at least some credibility as an entertainment media form. I never liked games being in the late lamented "Circuits" section; it assumed games were accessories to hardware.

Yes, it was a brief list with all the usual suspects and no real surprises. Very mainstream tastes. A full page, though, with some fairly good descriptions of what the games are about.

This is a small victory for the normalcy of gaming. It's not as controversial as yet another story on the value of gaming, or as navel gazing as a story on who gamers are as a subculture. Games are simply regarded as yet another source of popular entertainment with some big titles coming out this season. When the story of games and the media is written 25 years from now, this sort of minor step will be missed. But I appreciate it.

Where's the Warrior Princess?

Granted, almost every online gaming forum is dominated by men - the ratio is greater than 9:1 on most. And granted that this online presence is not necessarily reflective of the actual gamer population. But where are the female wargamers and strategy gamers?

They have to be out there, right? Lots of people who write about gender and gaming say that there is no such thing as a "girl game" - only good games and bad games. The relative prominence of female gamers on Sims forums or RPG forums or adventure forums supposedly says nothing about genetic predisposition in gaming.

Yet, some wargaming/strategy gaming communities are so confidently male that they can have entire threads devoted to cheesecake photos. (Try that at Neverwinter Connections and see what happens.) I don't condemn this in any way - the communties all seem to be men, they like pretty women, and no one seems to be put off by it. It does speak to a recognition that the strategy/wargaming world is a boy's club.

I know one serious female strategy gamer through IRC. She's not as heavy into wargames, but historical strategy games seem to be her bread and butter. And, I am assuming that all of those Korean gamers who still play Starcraft are not entirely male.

And it's not like strategy games do much to offend female gamers. There is no real equivalent of the buxom lass in bikini chain mail, and the god game nature of most titles renders the gender of the protagonist moot. Well, Stainless Steel's Cleopatra is ludicrously dressed. But you rarely see women up close in these games.

Military culture is very masculine - most military historians are male, too. I have found more female gamers interested in city building strategy games than RTS games, which either suggests a natural female bias to building over destruction or a socialization against resolving problems through conflict. But you find many more women willing to blow a guy's head off in Counterstrike or smite a foozle with Melf's Acid Arrow than to drop a load of blockbusters on Karakorum.

Theories, insights and female conquerors welcome in the comments.

Civilization moves forward

Matt Gallant has already made the joke about rushing production, but the early launch for Civilization IV is great news. It means that I have to wait a few less weeks for a new gaming fix, and if my earlier hands-on time with Civ IV means anything, I may not need another game for a while.

The pre-order special includes a tech tree map and a spiral bound manual for no extra cost - further encouragement for me to get my money down early once the retailers get up to speed on this offer. I think every game should come with a spiral manual, and tech trees where necessary. Better interfaces and in game help are increasingly making both manuals and fold out guides unnecessary, but I still like them. I'm a little old-fashioned that way.

The Multiplayer Problem

This recent article at Joystiq raises the problem of reviewing multiplayer games. Vladimir Cole says that the disparity between the critical opinion of Starcraft, among other games, was significantly different from the user opinion, largely because reviewers couldn't predict how enthusiastically the multiplayer universe would respond to it. "Starcraft earned an 88 rating on Metacritic but a 9.5 rating from users," Cole writes.

His numbers are a little misleading. If you use Gamerankings, the disparity is reversed - 93 per cent from critics, but only 88 from users. Computer Games Magazine, Computer Gaming World, Gamespot, PC Gamer and GamePro all gave it scores of ninety or higher, so any "multiplayer gap" is completely illusory in this situation.

This arguable piece of evidence shouldn't obscure Cole's basic point - how can you review a game in multiplayer if there is no multiplayer community? I doubt that it is "systematic", whatever he means by that, but it is an issue.

Take my early impressions of Age of Empires III based on the demo. Some people are looking at it and saying that they can see evidence of how great this game is going to be in MP. Based on what, I'm not sure. I couldn't make that leap. And considering how important the MP community is to the continuing sales success of Age of Kings, this is something that any review of the final game will have to consider.

I've only reviewed multiplayer games after the release date, so it's not too hard to see if MP gamers are rallying around a title. But the failure of online gamers to take a game to heart is not the same as the game being bad. You can probably accept that a very popular multiplayer game is a good multiplayer game, but the inverse is not true. Age of Mythology is an amazing game in all respects, but is a relative failure in the multiplayer community, especially when compared to its predecessors.

So what's a reviewer to do when there is not a large virtual community to get beaten repeatedly in? I've sometimes been fortunate to find colleagues and friends who were early adopters of a title, so I play against them. They can help point out things that they are experiencing, and there is generally time to debrief afterwards. We don't all have great LAN setups to put a game through its paces, and I would argue that my encounters with friends and colleagues is more similar to the average gaming experience.

The single player experience is still the core of PC gaming. Most people who've bought Age of Empires never play multiplayer for long, and many of the best selling games have no multiplayer component at all. Sims and Grand Theft Auto's success came in a world of growing broadband penetration and the growth of multiplayer. The 4 million World of Warcraft subscribers and increase in MP on consoles means that the tide is probably turning.

When that finally happens, reviewers may have to reorganize their thinking.

Age of Empires 3 demo fails to impress

Is that all there is?

The Age of Empires III demo was released yesterday, and I gave it a thorough play through. Three or four skirmish missions, the campaign scenarios, the "deck-building". And through it all, I was only mildly amused.

Ensemble's goal to make the best looking RTS ever seems to have been relaxed to "a RTS a little prettier than Empire Earth II. The water effects are nice, and even on my marginal video card, the game looked a lot more photorealistic than Age of Empires II. But there is more to art design than photo-realism. I liked the ships in the Cossacks series better.

The demo didn't give me any sense that I was settling a new world, and the deck-building mini-game was not very interesting; I assume that it is better suited to multi-player. The combat and resource gathering is nothing that I haven't seen before, and I got a general feeling that Ensemble is resting on its gameplay laurels while making things prettier. Even the much ballyhooed Home City concept turned out to be little more than a time-release supply depot.

Part of the disappointment is rooted in my expectations of Ensemble. They are still the kings of RTS, and have made three amazing games in a row. All of the previous Age games played differently and had major innovations from one to the next. The demo shows me little evidence of this.

Compare this to the demo of Rise of Nations a few years ago. That demo infused me with a zeal and excitement that made the first title from Big Huge Games rocket up my gift list. Though I will still pick up Age of Empires III, it's no longer the urgent matter it once was.

Diplomacy in October?

The Inquirer says that Paradox's version of the boardgame classic Diplomacy will be released in less a month - October 4.

This is great news for strategy gamers like me who eagerly await each new Paradox game, from the great (like Europa Universalis) to the near-great (like Crusader Kings) to the passable (like Victoria). We'll leave aside the dregs of the company (like Two Thrones).

Diplomacy poses a great challenge for the computer game developer. The board game depends entirely on player interaction. There are no dice, no spinners, no cards. Everything relies on making deals, carrying them out and knowing when to stab an ally in the back. To win, you have expand without provoking a counter-reaction from everyone else. Stalemates are common.

Designing an AI that can approximate human behavior is such an absurd ideal that to even try invites ridicule. No strategy game has ever created a truly dynamic diplomatic AI that can assess its position and its interests reliably from one situation to the next. Paradox plans to ship a variety of AIs with Diplomacy in order to give the player a greater number of player types to wage war against.

There have two other Diplomacy games for the PC and both were failures. Translating Diplomacy to the electronic world may be impossible - especially beyond the multiplayer world. People play Diplomacy over email all the time, so any decent MP interface can make it work online. Yes, Europa Universalis was originally a board game, but it was a marginal one at best. It was long, complicated and mostly unknown so Paradox could mess it up a little in the interests of the computer gaming community. Diplomacy is a classic; to mess with its rules in order to make it a more playable computer game is a great risk.

We should see the results soon.

How long is long enough?

Whenever someone says that they don't like a game, the title's fans will almost always ask the same question: "How long did you play it?". The questions takes many forms. "How far did you get?" "Do you have the x yet?" But the implications are the same. You cannot, apparently, have a valuable opinion on a game until you have played it to a certain point.

The question remains, where is this point? As a sometime game reviewer, I am duty bound to spend a lot more time playing some games I'm not enjoying than I would if it's just some collection filler from Ebay. When I tell my casual gaming friends the hours I put into a title that I gave two stars, they think I'm insane.

But, as a strategy gamer, I have to confess that many of the great games in my pet genre require a little more time to find the magic. Take Europa Universalis and its sequel - a title which I think is a modern classic. I was sucked in right away. Others need to put in more hours to be enchanted, so I fall back into the tired old advice to keep at it and ask questions if they need help.

Of course, if EU had come with a better manual, more people would get into it faster. And, even after all the extra time, I can't guarantee that everyone will like it.

I have two good casual gaming friends. In the last year or so, I've recommended three games to them in different contexts - Political Machine, Pirates!, and Rome: Total War. Both immediately got into the first two. They would come to lunch and we would talk about how tough Roosevelt was as an opponent or which Caribbean power had the hottest governors' daughters.

Rome was a split decision though. One guy loved it. He would be up until the wee hours of the morning playing. He would IM me with questions about how to beat scythed chariots. The other guy didn't. And the way he described it, he didn't seem to have played very much of it. Both had borrowed my disks, so there was no financial obligation to find something to like, and he admitted that he could see why we enjoyed it. But I was not convinced that he had given it a fair shot.

It became clear that he had played through the tutorial, including the intro "Unite Italy" campaign. Though an excellent tutorial for demonstrating the interface and how the game plays, like many good strategy games, the tutorial is only an appetizer for the main course - the Imperial Campaign with lots of generals and barbarians and elephants.

I know people who almost quit playing Baldur's Gate because it opened with lame FedEx and rat-killing quests. I've certainly quit playing some Euro-strategy games because I couldn't make the economy work. Does that disqualify me from saying that I think Anno 1602 is overrated?

Games are a strange thing. We would rightly ridicule someone who formed an opinion on a movie without seeing it, but games require a greater time investment. Should someone have to finish a RPG before they can have a strong opinion on it? Do we condemn our fellow gamers to hours of misery in a game they are not enjoying just so they can talk about it? In today's broadband world, should we require that our fellow gamers try out the multiplayer part of game in case they find that that is more their cup of tea?

So how long should we expect someone to play The Sims? Should a game grab you in the first two hours? What if it takes that long to figure out the relationships between items and units? Does it vary from genre to genre? Comment away.

In Defense of the RTS

As popular as the resource harvesting real time strategy game is, it's a little surprising to see it so often maligned. The entire sub-genre is often written off as having little to do with strategy, derided as a "clickfest" and to many of the hardcore gaming audience the RTS world is full of clones and knock-offs with little to no originality.

Some of the disdain is undoubtedly rooted in the popularity of the RTS. Even though most RTS games aren't very good, it is easy to blame the amazing success of the Warcrafts, Command and Conquers, and Ages of Empires for the flood of Cossacks, War Times, and Celtic Kings - and worse. But many of the complaints are borne out of the frustration that usually comes with the belief that you have seen it all before and that no one is making games for you.

Here is a brief defense of the real time harvesting strategy game.

There is no strategy in RTS: In fact, there is strategy in RTS, but it often is a similar strategy from game to game. Strategy implies long term planning, and few things typify long term (for a one hour game) like build orders, counter units and economic management. There is little in the way of tactics, to be sure. Once you have built your force, there is little need to manage it in combat beyond sending it in the right direction. (A few game break this mold - Kohan, Warcraft III, Act of War.)

It's all the the same strategy - economic efficiency: This is true, but misleading. RTS are about economic efficiency, but in the same way that 4X games are about expansion and FPS are about shooting without getting shot. But you never hear hardcore gamers complaining that all the shooters are the same because you have to do similar things in them. Economic efficiency and getting the biggest bang for your buck have been the currency of the sub genre since the beginning.

This does not mean that all economic efficiencies are the same. Take Age of Mythology. Though recognized by most reviewers as a good game, it never achieved the success of Age of Empires, probably because it messed up the economic efficiency expectations of players. In the Multiplayer world of AoM, many players have favorite gods or nations since they know the min/max ratios down. In random play, though, there is a lot to consider. Each nation has different ways to achieve favor. Each nation has different needs in resources. Each nation has a different troop balance.

It's all about who can click the fastest: Few genres emphasize hotkeys and mouse movement to the extent that RTS do. You have know what you need and when you can afford to build it. At the highest levels of MP action, the concept of build orders comes into play and can be frustrating for newer players. Most of us, though, have no real interest in becoming the best Warcraft player ever, so a basic understanding of build orders is all that's needed. Most players figure this out pretty quickly.

And RTS games aren't the only ones with build orders. All the Civ games encouraged a specific order in the early game. Sandbox games and city builders can be brutal if those first few dollars aren't invested in the right way. But because of the MP competitive aspect of RTS games, they have been "tainted" as though the mere presence of a build order means that less skill is involved. And in MP, the need for excellent situational awareness and quick reaction times with the mouse and keys is common to all genres - there is nothing special about RTS.

They are all clones: There are a lot of clones out there. But each of the major titles and series have a lot to separate them. Warcraft II is a predecessor of Age of Mythology, but the two are as different as humans are from homo erectus. Both Warcraft III and AoM have heroes, but they serve very different purposes. The factions in Rise of Nations are as distinct as the factions in Command and Conquer, but in more different ways. Act of War has only one resource, only two ways to get it, and similar factions - but the result is an original combination that has been sadly underappreciated by gamers.

And, as popular as World War II is as a game setting, there are remakably few RTS that ask you build factories to churn out Shermans and Stukas. A sub-genre of the RTS has been developed to focus more on prebuilt armies and missions, or allow the player to buy units for skirmish play - see Desert Rats: Afrika Korps or Codename Panzer for examples of this new spin on the RTS. To throw these games in with the craptastic War Times or been-there/done-that of Cossacks misses the variety within the RTS fold.

Someone once told me that all you really need is Starcraft, It works for Korea, but not for me.

There are certainly legitimate reasons to dislike RTS games. They are often short play sessions, so if you are a builder type, the pressure to quickly go on the offensive will certainly offend. Though there are real time wargames, most of these are not wargames; if you were sucked in by Cossacks' promises of grand 17th century battles or the deceptive Age of Empires screenshots that showed all these soldiers neatly lined up, welcome to the wonderful world of deceptive marketing. Though pathfinding has gotten better and formations are more common, many RTS still devolve into a lot of your pawns beating on the other guy's pawns until somebody wins. The need for superweapons in a lot of the games is a sign that designers are still not sure how to deal with endgame stalemates.

But don't dismiss the sub-genre completely. You are missing some really interesting games, and the next six months will see Age of Empires go to a world very familiar and Rise of Legends to one we've never seen before. You'd hate to be left out.

Railroad Tycoon of Catan

The thing about setting yourself up as an advocate is that people begin to call you on it. That's what happened last week when I got an email from Bruce Geryk about a couple of games he's really keen on that he thinks need more word of mouth. In short, he said "Advocate this!"

One of the games is Battlefront's dogfighting card game Down in Flames, which I've played in demo. I'll reserve further comment until I get my hands on the full package.

The other is Ticket 2 Ride, an award winning board game from Days of Wonder. There is a computer version online that allows you to play for free - you can join any game, but you can only host once you've paid up.

The post title really sums up what the game is about. You build railways across American or Europe and accumulate points based on completion of goals ("tickets") and length of track built. It is a really easy game to learn since there are so few rules and very few pieces.

It's certainly not heavy strategy. It's a beer and pretzel game with probably less heavy thinking than Catan, but probably more than, say, Axis and Allies. (Of course, I hate Axis and Allies. ) It is a tiny, tight game that really shows the importance of good game design. All choices are important, you can't do everything and you have to keep an eye on your own goals and not just react to your opponents.

The real beauty of it is that it plays very quickly. A two player game can be done in 15 minutes. Add a couple more, and you're still looking at a game run through in under an hour. I will certainly put Ticket 2 Ride in my buy list and encourage all of you to try it out.

Slitherine Campaign Documents

IGN is running a series of bits that give us some insight into the campaigns in Slitherine's upcoming strategy title Legion: Arena. There have been three so far; Caudine Forks, Cannae and Zama. For some reason, they are in the RPGVault section of the site.

Considering that Legion: Arena will allow the player to develop his/her own army and allot experience to the troops, the role playing connection is clear. But the campaign diaries at IGN offer no hint of how that will work. In fact, the previews are little more than accounts of major historical battles, illustrated with screenshots from the game and the occasional picture from an Osprey book. The descriptions are certainly lively (even if today's exaggerates the impact that Hannibal's elephants had at Zama), but serve as little more than accounts of battles that are mostly well documented elsewhere.

How will these battles fit into the context of the game? Can the player enter these battles with the historic setup or will he/she have the opportunity to develop his/her own personal army to refight them? Where is the discussion of the command structure, which will allow the player to give limited commands to armies in the field based on experience and ability?

As interesting as these historic battles are, they don't do a lot to generate enthusiasm about the game.

Compare this to Creative Assembly's previews before Rome. The most significant were their Decisive Battles/Time Commander TV ventures. Time Commander is the superior show since it actually shows people playing the game. There were options beyond the historic outcomes. But in both, the key to the success of the programs was that they let interested gamers look at the game in action. And it look beautiful. Which worked because the 3D battles were the major selling point of the game. It turned out that the campaign was great, too, but screenshots and movies worked to show gamers how it would look since that's what a lot of us were interested in.

We are not interested in how Legion: Arena looks. At least not primarily.

Don't get me wrong. It looks just fine. It doesn't have the sheen of Rome, but that's not what these guys are about. This game is about army building and personal connection to your troops. Previews should show that. It's not like you can jam a Legion: Arena preview with talk about different factions, because there aren't that many. What previews there are out there mostly tell us stuff we already know.

Carnival of Gamers - September edition

The Carnival is back at AFK Gamer. Lots of great submissions, so go over there and get your fill of cotton candy goodness.