On the Outside Looking In

My favorite gaming forum has become infested by Oblivion. Bethesda's latest role playing epic is the year's first must-have game. It has been widely anticipated, heavily previewed and extensively screenshotted ever since it was announced. I expect that whereever you read and talk about games, Oblivion is the game de jour.

It is also one more must have game that I do not have. I don't have World of Warcraft either - the Really Big Thing for the last two gaming seasons. Or Doom 3. Or Half Life 2. I don't even have Diablo.

The lack of FPS in my house is understandable. I'm not very good at them, and as they have gotten better looking I have found myself getting more disoriented in the virtual battlescapes. The lack of RPGs is more surprising since RPGs are the second staple of my household. We do have Morrowind, after all. And everything Bioware has ever done for a PC.

The sum effect of the gaps in my gaming shelf is that sometimes I have very little to talk about. I really enjoy vicarious pleasure, mind you. The enthusiasm of others is pretty easy to get caught up in. And, one very good friend excepted, most people I trust are pretty enthusiastic about Oblivion. But I'm on the outside. I can't ask good questions about the game. I can't answer good questions about the game. And this enthusiasm isn't quite contagious enough for me to get past my lingering misgivings over Morrowind's control scheme.

This feeling isn't limited to games. When people talk about The Sopranos or 24 I am similarly out to sea.

And I have to accept that no game that really excites me (excepting the permanent outlier Civ 4) will ever have the mass media appeal of an Elder Scrolls game. Does anyone really think that Europa Universalis III or even Rise of Legends will ever spawn a dozen threads on a single forum in the first week of release? Even mass sellers like The Sims don't engender the same type of mania on most online gaming forums.

So, the mass marketing media phenomenon of Oblivion is also, in many ways, a cult hit. It has a crossover appeal to hardcore obsessive min/maxers that few other major releases do. And my niche games - unlike the indie RPG Mount and Blade - don't have that same audience. So, my interests are doubly niched, except on those few forums that are dedicated to my perverse preferences.

It's not necessarily a sad or dismal existence, and I could easily become part of the crowd by just shelling out the sixty bucks for Oblivion or caving the above mentioned friend's pleas to join his World of Warcraft fun.

But Goodfellows are made of sterner stuff than that. I survived middle school as a wallflower. This too will pass.

Battle for Middle Earth 2 rocks

Or so says my review at Strategy Zone.

There is no perfect game, and Battle for Middle Earth II is no exception. But it is one of the best real time strategy games I've ever played.

In the end, it boils down to elegance. Battle for Middle Earth II has six races, each with completely unique units. There are two alignments with different power trees. And each race has unique heroes (except for the good and evil super-heroes). All of this could get confusing.

Somehow it doesn't. The units mostly fit a rock/scissors/paper setup, but this is blown apart by the addition of trolls, heroes and the occasional flying beastie. The counters are usually pretty obvious in any case. After all, only archers can hit the airborne enemies, and heroes usually fit a couple of templates.

And even if you don't precisely know which counter to use, it probably doesn't affect your enjoyment because the game is glorious in so many ways. Heroes can take stands against hordes of enemies. Fellbeasts and dragons swoop to attack and then must reorient for their next pass. Tom Bombadil sings and dances your enemies to death.

BfME2, like its predecessor, is more for fans of the movie than fans of the book. There really isn't enough random Middle Earth lore for your typical Tolkien geek. Things are meant to look good and brave (or evil and devious), so the game is solid evidence that good art design and colorful graphics can affect gameplay. Whatever "immersion" is, the clean look of Battle for Middle Earth II contributes to it.

Now, this is an Electronic Arts game and it is fashionable in some circles to hate Electronic Arts. But they gave me The Sims. And now this. So as far as I am concerned, all is forgiven.

My review of Galactic Civilizations II

You can read my opinions of Stardock's hit Galactic Civilizations II in this month's Computer Games Magazine. You can also read my review of Takeda 2 - a marginal sequel to a marginal original - and my capsule reviews of Star and Crescent and Prussia's Glory - two wargames that won't have the broad appeal of GalCiv2.

Like almost everyone else, I say a lot of nice things about the 4x space game. And it was an easy call. Great games usually are.

Writing the review, haggling over the final score for it and exchanging thoughts on the game with other reviewers have cemented in my mind my distaste for the component scoring system. You know the one - those sites that break a game into individual bits like graphics and gameplay and then try to use those small bits to come to a larger score.

There are a lot of things objectively wrong with GalCiv2 as it ships. The documentation has a number of important oversights. It does not Alt-Tab well. Registering the game was a chore made more complicated by overloaded systems as everyone tried to register it. At their best, the graphics are very good; then you have the planetary invasion screens which look terrible. The story based campaign is just not that interesting - even when the bad guys show up with their super weapons. There is no multiplayer.

So, if you have to assign individual scores to graphics, documentation, storytelling, and technical stuff, GalCiv2 drops from the great to the merely good. And you end up missing the best 4x sci-fi game since Masters of Orion 2.

Bruce Geryk wrote the review for 1up.com. As I read it, I was a little surprised at how much it deviated from anything resembling a game review template. Why did he like it again? There wasn't much I could put my finger on. But the tone of the review was clear. He was enjoying this game. So, we talked back and forth a bit about the little things that got in the way of our thrills.

And none of it mattered in the end. A lot of the same objective criticisms can be made about Crown of Glory, a Napoleonic wargame that quickly wore out its welcome. Like GalCiv2, too much is left under the hood to really understand what is going on. Diplomacy can be a bit wonky. The documentation leaves out some important details. But the difference between the two is huge.

"It's the gameplay!" I hear you cry. Well, no. It's not. Since I don't quite know what you mean by that. The difference is that even when I am floundering around in GalCiv2, I don't care about all the niggling details. I am given a generous world to explore that doesn't require I understand everything that is going on. Good design allows a developer to hide some things, explain others and render others completely mysterious. (Personally, I'm on the side of transparency so long as it doesn't force me to be some godlike accountant.)

Civilization IV: Warlords summary

A quick scan of the fact sheet for the upcoming Civ IV expansion shows few surprises. Here are some of the additions and some of my notes.

A new great person type: the "Warlord." -- Why go with a whole new word and not just "Great General" to go with the Great Scientist or Great Prophet thing? And will there be military specialists to go with this great person?

Vassal States -- Conquering civilizations in Civ IV is a major undertaking, so I can only imagine that vassal states are similar to the subjugating peace option available in Alpha Centauri. Instead of destroying the enemy outright, I suspect that, if you are really crushing an enemy, you will have the option to make them your puppet.

6 New Civilizations with unique units. -- Which civs? No idea and no clues from the screenshots. But here's my guess - Vikings, Babylonians, Zulu, Turks, Carthaginians and Iroquois.

Ten new leaders -- Screenshots already reveal Augustus, Stalin, Churchill and an Egyptian, probably Ramsses. So that leaves six leaders to cover six new civs. Not a lot of options for the new guys.

New Scenarios: Chinese Unification, Peloponnesian Wars, Alexander's Conquests, Rise of Rome, Vikings, Genghis Khan -- Well, the Vikings scenario confirms the Vikings as a civ, and the Rise of Rome description mentions Carthage, so two of my guesses are spot on. Three scenarios in the ancient Mediterranean and two in East Asia is pretty familiar to me. I guess it's time for me to get to work on my scenario of the Hussite Wars if I want some really new adventures.

The usual chrome: new units, new resources, unique buildings -- What types of new units? Screenshots show trebuchets and slingers. New resources should include tobacco, or something that doesn't make the musket available to just everyone. I miss fighting for saltpeter. Each civ will get a unique building, too. I'm guessing something philosophical for the Greeks. Maybe a movie theater for the Americans.

In all, a typical "more, more, more" expansion pack. It's only a few months off, and I will be there opening day buying it as soon as I can. I'm a lemming.

But I'm not sold on this expansion being necessarily great. Remember Civ III: Play the World? Well, this new expansion will include all that stuff we were promised back in the fall like the pitboss, and, I assuming, the mod tools. This too could spell disaster.

Of course, that was all fixed with Civ III: Conquests and all was forgiven. I can never stay mad at these guys.

2k Games announces the 2006 Firaxis lineup

I mostly don't believe in premonitions. But I've had a hell of an odd month considering 2k's announcements.

It was only yesterday that I was complaining about the surge of Roman city building sims. So what does 2k announce? CivCity: Rome. For those keeping count, that makes four Roman city builders. In 2006. Nuts. It will be developed by Firefly Games (the Stronghold guys) with Firaxis overseeing things. By the way, since Firefly is manned by many former Impressions people, they will be going head to head on the same sort of game against Tilted Mill. Let the fur fly.

Last week I talked about the news that Poptop Games was being folded into Firaxis, reuniting hot IP Railroad Tycoon with its founding father. So what is announced? Sid Meier's Railroads! It's their exclamation point and not mine. It looks like it will be Railroad Tycoon IV in all but name, though the early artwork (naturally) is pretty train heavy.

So the least exciting announcement was the obvious Civilization IV expansion, subtitled Warlords. The screens there show some new leaders (Stalin, Churchill, Augustus, artwork for Ramsses), what appears to be new archer artwork, slingers, a trebuchet...no hint on the new civs. The press release makes me suspect a larger emphasis on the military side with new "warlord" units. This, too, was predictable given the muted complaints about how difficult conquest could be.

Not a really exciting lineup, to be honest. All that talent in one office and still no great new idea. Would it kill them to surprise me?

Even more Roman cities

CDV has announced that it and Enlight Software are working on a city-building sim set in ancient Rome called Glory of the Roman Empire. Jason Ocampo has a brief preview at Gamespot. Videos of the game are also available at the site.

Ocampo writes "It's been a while since we've had an ancient-city-building game set in Roman times", apparently oblivious to the fact that this makes three on the schedule for the next year or so. So while it is true we haven't had one in a while, we've been watching the development of a couple for quite some time.

Heart of Empire: Rome from Deep Silver via Paradox will be hitting store shelves in mid-May. Tilted Mill is hard at work on Caesar IV, which we will be seeing some time in the fall.

From this standpoint, it's not clear what the differences between the three will be. All will be city-builders, all will have trade, limited combat and a scenario based campaign.

The big question for me is "Why Rome, now?" Historical city-builders have always been in short supply, and have almost entirely come from one development house - Impressions. Rome has always been more attractive for game development because of the near universal familiarity with its look and history. And there could be an element of Rome catching, since Creative Assembly's battle strategy game was a huge international hit, bringing in people who had never played any of the other Total War games.

For the former Impressions people at Tilted Mill, Rome is familiar ground. Their wonderful Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile introduced a lot of new gameplay elements that revitalized a subgenre that really had little new to offer from one civilization to the next.

Since I'll play anything with togas, all three will make my buy list. I hope they will have something to distinquish themselves from each other. It's a pain paying 150 bucks for three copies of the same game.

RTS Economics

Real time strategy games are mostly, at their heart, about economics.

(I'm talking here about those RTS that require base-building and unit creation of some form - not one of the many other types of strategy games that just happen to move with the clock.)

With these games, the prevailing paradigm has been the peasant economy. You build a lot of peons and send them to resource nodes to harvest. The trick is balance your civilian and military forces in such a way that revenue is steady, but your population cap isn't blocked by berry pickers and gold miners.

This type of economy often involves a lot of micromanagement. You have to notice when your harvesters have exhausted a node, you have to consider any resource gathering bonuses, you have to measure how far you are willing to go from your base to get that stack of wood. Rise of Nations and Cossacks tried to minimize some of this micromanagement by giving you inexhaustible mines and forests, but the basic trade-offs were the same. Harvesters are cheap, weak and an essential cog in the machine.

Battle for Middle Earth II has a much different economic structure. Peasants are not cheap - they cost more than many basic soldiers so you will not be building hordes of them. There are no resource nodes. Economic structures can be built anywhere and their productivity is determined by the surrounding land. And once these structures are built, all you have to do is defend them. No slaughtering of animals or reaping of grain. You just plop the building down and off they go, making money for you.

This gives you an entirely new economic calculus. Resource growth is based on expansion and territorial control. Battles for the middle ground matter earlier, and the relatively high cost of builders means that every builder death matters more than a single peasant death in Age of Empires. So do you build a third builder? Do you build the farm first or the tower you might need to protect it? Every second matters.

The difference is subtle, but the cost-benefit balance of the traditional RTS becomes a matter of risk-reward in a game where your resource chain is theoretically infinite but highly dependent on one or two fragile units. Instead of making sure that your peasants are working on the best way to accumulate the most important resource (hunting vs. farms in AoM, handling the perennial wood shortage in AoE3, sparing guys to work oil fields in RoN) you are forced to find the best way to protect your supply infrastructure.

A lot of this is based on the real difference between the forms - BfME is a game where the point is to get into a fight as soon as possible. Act of War was like this, too. Like BfME2, it had a single resource (money) that could be gathered in a number of ways. The only infinite stream, though, was to capture some PoWs and lock them up. And the big money - banks - were usually in contested territory. None of this starting by a berry bush and a bunch of cattle.

The traditional RTS economic model, like AoE, RoN, Empire Earth, Cossacks, and Warcraft is designed to slowly give you access to the cool weapons, often through "aging up" - in effect, researching expensive techs so you can get to your side's superweapons. This means steady management of a number of different resource streams. Sure, you can rush. But remember that the most likely positive outcome of the rush is to cripple the early economic game of your opponent. Not many games today are designed with the fatal rush as a possibility in the early game.

The RTS for dummies economic model that BfME2 follows helps cement it in my mind as a great intro RTS for people who haven't been introduced to the genre. (My final review should be available in a week or so.) I don't want to suggest that it is always a better way. Strategy games that force me to think about my economic infrastructure tax a part of the brain beyond changing my rally point. The fire-and-forget harvesting model in Rise of Nations gives you all the economic finagling with very little shepherding of little shepherds.

Anyway, variety is good. Is this innovation? At the margins, certainly.When people complain that all RTS games are the same, it is often the peon management that they are addressing. Attempts by game designers to break out of the Warcraft mode frees other developers to think of new ways to control the building of units.

Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath Review

My first review for Strategy Zone Online is up. Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath is a Cold War era RTS set in a world where Kennedy and Khrushchev didn't reach a peaceful settlement of the 1962 crisis.

I liked it a little better than most reviewers have. It's not a recommendation - even at a score in the high sixties. Quirks of the site's scoring system lead to a score that high. But I do think that it has something that game designers should take a look at.

CMC has an innovative turn-based campaign mode that, with a better skirmish game underneath, could have made it stand out as a major title. Instead, poor map design and some really difficult missions mean that the campaign mode will be ignored by most gamers.

What I've written for Strategy Zone Online

Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath review
Battle for Middle Earth II review

Railroad Tycoon Goes Home to Daddy?

Gamespot is reporting that a conference call with Take Two Interactive revealed that PopTop, the developer of Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3, Shattered Union, and Tropico has been folded into Firaxis, best known for Alpha Centauri, the 2004 Pirates! and, of course, Civilization III and IV.

Given Take Two's latest business woes, this is an obvious cost cutting measure. Supporting two strategy development houses means that you will be paying out to two groups whose games will appeal to the same bunch of gamers and take strategy market share from each other.

The idea of Railroad Tycoon returning the stable of Sid Meier has a certain appeal, even though the series has been in great hands at PopTop. It's not clear how much downsizing this will mean or how/if Firaxis will be restructured to accomodate the new people.

Something old is someplace new

Do It Yourself Games seems to have gone quiet again, which means that one more venue for my ranting has gone kaput. This is not a great loss for me since I have this place to complain, as well as another location or two that will put up with me.

The great loss, in my opinion, was the extinction of Jozef Purdes' Indie Adventure Column. No one reviews these games, and there's a good reason for that. But sometimes he turns up a real gem. And the man can write.

So it's good news that he is still doing the column, but on his own blog now. So if you want to read Jozef's opinions on independent adventure games, you can now find them here.

Developer Interview: Norb Timpko

Last year's Civil War Bull Run:Take Command 1861 was one of last year's big surprises. A game that could have been just Bull Run: Total War was in fact a compelling and endlessly replayable masterpiece. I had some minor misgivings related to the low res graphics at the action level, but I was mostly impressed. And I was not alone.

MadMinute games' co-founder Norb Timpko agreed to answer a few questions about Take Command 1861 and their upcoming sequel.
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Were you surprised by the overwhelmingly positive critical reaction that greeted Take Command 1861?

Very surprised. We worked on this thing for 3 years before anyone else ever saw it. We basically worked by ourselves with very few people even knowing what we were doing. Then the release was completely messed up, so we thought nothing was going to happen with it. The publisher didn't send out any review copies that we knew of, so we sent them all out ourselves. Then the reviews started coming in and we were blown away. This is the first time that I have ever written AI and people were going crazy over it. Saying that it was better than some of the big dev houses games. Our jaws were dropping. Our reviews were all in 4 out of 5 range. Then we won a Wargamer award and we really felt that we had accomplished something.

In spite of this reception, the game is no longer available from the publisher. Why did they discontinue it?

I can't speak for them, so I can only offer my opinion based on our conversations. The game did not sell well enough for a budget title. The keep a budget title on the store shelves, you've got to move a lot of units. We moved units, but not nearly enough. It's really too bad because it's really starting to gain legs. We just won a couple of year end awards and no one can find the game. It's becoming a collectors item. People are selling it on ebay for ridiculous sums.

How did you hook up with Paradox for Second Manassas?

They had been emailing us for a while. They said that they heard about us on their own forums. So when we decided to test the waters for a new publisher, they were one of the people that we contacted. I remembered the company because Hearts of Iron II came out about the same time as CWBR, and I remember being very impressed with the marketing of the game. Especially compared to CWBR which received none. They flew into town for a meeting and we were very impressed with what they had to say. We'll know better a few months after release.

Why another Bull Run game and not one of the more popular battles, like Gettysburg or Antietam?

A bunch of reasons really. This was supposed to be a very quick game. Something we could turn around so that people would remember us. We had a few things we wanted to change from CWBR and we wanted to get another title out quickly that didn't have the budgetware stigma attached to it. The reason we haven't done the more popular battles yet is that we are still growing the engine. We want it to be perfect when we attack the big ones. Also, we are limited in map size with our current 3D engine, so we need an answer for that before we attack some of the larger battlefields.

What can we expect in the way of changes for the new game?

The first thing that everyone is going to notice is the improved visuals: high resolution units that look absolutely awesome and crops on the maps. The corn and wheat look amazing. But what we really improved is what's under the hood. We have many ways to play open play now, there's something for everyone. The biggest new feature is carryover. A scenario designer can now link scenarios and have casualties from one scenario enter into another scenario. You'd better protect your men today, because you're going to need them tomorrow. It really adds a new dynamic to gameplay, which goes right towards our goal of wanting you to really feel what it was like to be a Civil War Officer.

Many fans have been clamoring for multiplayer functionality in your games. Is this just too much to ask for at this point?

It is too much. We still work on this game at night and on the weekends. We've been doing it for over 4 years now. It's all that we can do to keep up with the single player game. We just don't have the time, energy, or resources to do multiplayer as well. Our goal is that someday the Take Command series will generate enough revenue to allow the two of us to work full time on the game, at that point we write multiplayer.

Historically, the Civil War has been a fairly constant theme in computer games, but there has been a considerable lack of these in recent years. Why do you think that is?

Because they don't make enough money. Games are getting written by these giant companies that need huge profits to write a game. On the independent war game sites, there are a lot of Civil War Games. You just won't see them in stores too much. We figured that since the big boys can't make enough writing Civil War Games, then maybe two guys could make enough. We'll let you know how that turns out.

Besides the money, what is the hardest part about working independently? What's the best part?

It's the 15 hour days. It's working full time all day to get a paycheck, then working full time all night and on weekends for your dreams. It's just really tough to put in those types of hours for so many years. The best part is to be able to do things your own way. There's no bureaucracy in a two many company. We don't need massive staff meetings or thousand page documents. Every decision is worked out by a single phone call. Things get done and they get done quickly. We always make our dates.

Any plans for the game after Bull Run 2?

We do have plans, we just don't know what they are yet. We might do an expansion pack. We might just continue onto the next battle. We'll have to see. A lot depends on how TC2M does. Because if it does well, then we'll be talking to Paradox. If it doesn't do well, we'll have to decide what we can do on our own.