hexgrid

This week's Unlimited Hyperbole podcast is somewhat relevant to this discussion as well: http://joemartinwords.com/2013/04/24/unlimited-hyperbole-20/ I don't agree with all of it, but that doesn't make it any less interesting. If you haven't listened to UH, it's a pretty good series. The "seasons" are short, and the episodes are perhaps 15 minutes apiece, but they are well put together. The format is an interview with commentary, with the questions edited out so all you hear is the interviewee talking with occasional context supplied in a voiceover. The whole series is worth listening to; 20 episodes of about 15 minutes each, each with a different interviewee. Each season has a theme, and there are five episodes per season, so you could think of a season of UH being about as long as an episode of 3MA. Which means you'll burn through them pretty fast; I can get through a season (or an episode of 3MA) on my train ride to/from the office, so I could get through the entirety of UH in two days of commuting, currently.

That's why I mentioned the hurdles; perhaps my metaphor was wrong. My point was that you have to be willing to deal with all that stuff to get into multiplayer, and a lot of people won't, for a variety of reasons. "Can't be bothered." is a legitimate reason, as is "Don't have time.". This is stuff we do for fun, after all. I don't think it's that, so much. I've actually worked on these things, and in my experience the problem with campaigns is... well, imagine you'd just designed chess. You have this system you've built full of simple interlocking rules that have lots of interesting interplay. When you were designing it, you were picturing how everything would work together, how the different movement rules could be used tactically, and so forth. The result is a (hopefully) finely tuned machine. You build it, it works. Now, you need to add a campaign. Are you going to have 30 games of straight chess? There's no challenge ramp there, and the player will barely be able to tell the 26th scenario from the 14th. The campaign is expected to be the tutorial as well, so you've probably got to make the first few scenarios expository, but chess gets less interesting very quickly if you start yanking pieces from the opening lineup. On the other hand, if you introduce all the units at once you've got nothing interesting to show the player during the long slog through the scenarios. Ignoring external pressure to wedge characters and plot into the campaign, that's the problem; these things are designed as complete games, and the campaign design all but demands that you deliver that game to the player in various stages of evisceration before eventually letting them actually play this brilliant thing you built as it was intended. They won't see the game as it was designed to be played until they've fought through most of the campaign, and they may not even see glimmerings of it until a significant amount of play time has been invested. To the designer, (speaking for myself, at least), the appeal of PVP is: - the AI can never play the game as well as you'd like it to, unless you've managed to design something brilliant like Unity of Command where the AI has clear, machine-solvable tasks - skirmish is the whole toybox, the entire system as it was designed to play - skirmish doesn't get weighted down with cheese; there are no bait-and-switch objectives, no trigger boxes causing cutscenes or enemy forces to spawn, no escort missions Of those, only the AI really makes PVP interesting. Skirmish vs. the AI answers the other two. The answer to this, arguably, is to design the game system in a more modular fashion so that it's more amenable to being split into bite sized systems that can be fed to the player in a campaign setting. That's not a trivial design challenge, though, and it may not even be feasible for a relatively simple design; imagine that instead of chess, above, you had checkers. How are you going to split that up?

Caveat: you may need to dig out the original box release on floppies to see these; I have no idea whether they changed anything in the re-release.

That's fair. I think a lot of the reasons people go for the single player experience comes down to three things, though: - inertia -- you probably bought it as a single player game, previous games you played are single player, "campaign" is probably the top item in the menu... - lack of hassle -- single player has no waiting for the server, no looking for a match, no lag, no internet connectivity problems, no account setup, no dealing with badly socialized strangers who make you question your faith in humanity - performance anxiety -- when you're first getting in to a game, chances are everyone is going to mop the floor with you for a while If you can get past all that, human opponents will give you consistently the best and most interesting challenges, and you'll learn things playing against human opponents that an AI will never be able to teach you. For most people in most games, though, one of those hurdles winds up being too high.

Agreed; it's really easy to pick up bad habits fighting the computer, since it's usually perfectly content to throw waves of things at your strongest defenses. I remember in the original Dune 2, when an enemy unit spotted one of your units for the first time, the game would take the paths the two units had followed and treat that as the path to your base. So, you could build a giant line of rocket towers and then have your scout march back and forth in front of them clearing back one line of fog at a time, and then send him off to die finding the enemy base. The enemy forces would follow the same path back like ants, and then march back and forth in front of your turrets. It was like Space Invaders: Alien Massacre. That was also a game where the combined unit limit was 64, so you if you built a light infantry guy every time an enemy unit died, eventually you had 64 guys and they had none and couldn't build any. What we used to do "back in the day" to break out of that mindset was play Total Annihilation with the unit limit cranked down to 4 per player. You couldn't build static defenses because you were wasting your precious unit cap with something that the enemy could just avoid. It's a completely different game at that point. You've got the commander, and then 3 unit slots. Want combat units? Well, the factory is going to count towards your unit limit as well, so you'll probably want to reclaim it once the unit is built. And if one commander dies on the same screen as another, BOOM, it's a draw. I have memories of a friend's commander running around the map looking for me while being nicked to death by a fighter I'd built. He couldn't hit it and it was gradually picking away at him, so he was trying to find me to force a draw. IIRC he caught me trying to get a second fighter in the air and got his draw in the end.

I find in RTSs I generally tower my way to victory if it's an option. It's partly because towers are typically fairly sturdy things; I don't usually enjoy sending hordes of fungible popcorn at the enemy. The copy I have here says it was developed by Zono, and published by Psygnosis and Take 2. The copyright date is 2000, if that helps you hunt it down. Edit: there's a wishlist for it up on GOG. http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/metal_fatigue

Human opponents are always going to be the most fun. If an AI is weak, it feels cheesy when the scenario designer handicaps you to compensate. If an AI is strong, it's frustrating to be taken apart methodically by a machine. And the AI never has to play by the same rules as you do. I know the 3MA crew like Sacrifice, but it's a game where I found the problem was particularly noticeable; you, the player are restricted to a nearly first-person point of view, and take actions through a pie menu. The AI can see and command the entire map, and has no interface lag when doing things like casting spells. I stalled out in the later levels of Sacrifice because I just couldn't knock the enemy wizard down fast enough; he'd never beat me, but when I got close enough to his base he got up as fast as I knocked him down, and he could fire off four spells for every spell I could manage. I generally had a monopoly on souls on the map by that point, so my forces and I could keep knocking him down, but I could never quite slog all the way up to his spawn point for long enough to finish him. There's a similar problem with AI skirmish in any RTS. You, the player, are stuck going through a (probably) keyboard and mouse-driven map interface, and if something isn't on the screen or a hotkey you need to get it on the screen to refer to it. The AI has no such limitation; in a single frame update the AI can assign unique orders to every single one of its units, and it can do it again next frame, and the frame after. In essence, the AI can micromanage everything at an effectively infinite "actions per minute" rate. A human opponent has the same interface limitations you do. They make mistakes, and they make leaps of genius, and everything in between. Until we solve the strong AI problem (ie: an AI human enough that you can legitimately be friends with them -- don't hold your breath for this) and put those strong AIs behind simulations of the same limits the human players have, human opponents are always going to be the most satisfying. That's not to say you couldn't make an AI experience that seems somewhat reminiscent of a multiplayer online game with strangers; if you hacked ELIZA to curse and hurl sexual and racial epithets you'd be pretty close to passing the Turing test in some online game communities.

Most people see "tutorial" in the menu and read it as "boredom simulator". IIRC the term Mr. Zacny used was "Strategy Tee-Ball", which is fairly apropos. When the assumption is that the player may not ever have sat in front of a computer before, the tutorial turns into an awful grinding experience for anyone who actually knows how a mouse works. Especially when some bright spark inevitably decides that the tutorial should be Part Of The Story, and run by Gruff Drill Instructor or Emotionless British Computer Lady. I think an answer is to have a standalone "total newb" tutorial that almost everyone will ignore, but which is there if you've really never touched one of these games before. Something that's a combination of a textbook, a checklist and a sandbox, where you can look things up, have some small directed "quests" you can ignore, cancel or replay, and just play with the units and controls. At the campaign level I think you should only teach things that are unique to your game. To take an example, Metal Fatigue was a mostly standard RTS, but it had 3 levels of map (underground, ground, air) that interacted, and also had giant robots built of interchangeable parts that were salvageable and researchable. As a third uniqueish thing, it had a shield around your base that you could extend over the map with repeaters, and when your units were inside your shield they took less damage. For that game, I'd have been inclined to have the campaign walk the player through the robots, and I probably would have introduced the map layers one at a time, but everything else goes in the standalone newb tutorial; if you'd played any other RTS (and let's face it, if you bought Metal Fatigue, you probably had), you already knew the rest. The shield is sort of unique, but it's such an easy concept to grasp that it doesn't require much more than hints.

From the developer point of view I think that scratches the surface a little, but there's a deeper element, I think. An RTS is generally designed as a whole package; the core design may not have had all the final units when it went down on paper, but the final form of the complete game is visible in the original design. The team then sets out to build that design, with the result being a (probably alpha) complete version of the RTS, with something approaching an unbalanced but relatively complete final unit set. At that point, the campaign starts being built. The campaign has a bunch of requirements; must be X hours of "gameplay", must have at least Y missions, must tell a story, must be a tutorial for the game... Some poor bastard or set of bastards has to fill that giant pit. If they need (say) a 30 mission campaign, they can't just give you the full unit complement for all 30 missions, or you'll barely be able to remember which was which. So they wind up having to take this swiss watch of a game an say "Ok, in the first mission the player just gets the crown gear." And you have the mission about moving the camera and shooting a water tower with a tank. On to mission 2, "crown gear and spring"! Then someone leans in and says "The producer isn't sure that modern FPS players will be familiar with the concept of grouping, we need there to be a grouping tutorial in some mission before the sixth one." And someone else will decide that the girl with the improbable physique driving the combat motorcycle needs to be in more cutscenes where we're looking at her from low and behind, so we need more "story". Somewhere between mission 18 and 25, the people doing the scenarios will have utterly lost their will to live, or will be slipping easter eggs into the missions in the subconscious hope that they'll be fired and thus be able to escape with honour. That will be just before the producer decides that the maps aren't "dynamic" enough and need to "play better". When quizzed about what "better" means, the producer will explain "it needs to pop more, you know, be more fun, and better looking". I've never worked that trench myself; I've been in the next trench over, writing code. But I can still sympathize.

Warhammer is bonkers enough that I find I can forgive things I wouldn't forgive elsewhere.

This is only barely on topic, and I'm basically reviving an old thread to post this, but apparently if you dreamed of Civil War lego for your miniature gaming pleasure... http://shop.lego.com/en-CA/The-Lone-Ranger-ByTheme?CMP=EMC-SH2013_04-15_LoneRanger_F_CA&HQS=hero_image&RRID=41250235&RMID=SAH_2013_04_15_LoneRanger_PR_CA Ok, it's actually "Lone Ranger", but... lego gatling on a train. What else need be said?

That basically describes the relationship I had with Total Annihilation when it came out. The problem with RTS puzzles, at least to me, is... well... What I want from a tactical scenario is a problem to solve. I want to be given a problem, be able to examine it, and then set out to solve it. I don't usually solve it on the first try, but ideally it ought to be possible if I analyzed the problem well enough. See, for example, Unity of Command, where the scenarios can be brutal, but in principle a skilled player could look at them with a critical eye and crush them, and two different skilled players would potentially do it differently. I think a lot of players (including myself) use "puzzle" as a shorthand for scenarios that have one possible solution, that solution is hidden from you until you've played and fallen at several different hurdles, and even once you understand the solution you still have to execute it perfectly to win. The term "puzzle" is technically broader than that, but I think that's what people are really complaining about; the kind of scenario where the answer is ultimately just paint-by-number, but you have to determine which color matches which number by trial and error. And you fail if you don't paint each area perfectly. When I denigrate a scenario as being just a puzzle, that's the kind of thing I mean. There was a scenario in Red Alert (IIRC; it might have been one of the other games in the C&C series) for example where you were controlling a single soldier on foot. There were a whole sequence of hoop-jumpy things you had to do to win; there were dogs that attacked you, people who shot at you, barrels you had to shoot and explode. In some ways it wasn't even a puzzle; you could more or less see what the level wanted you to do, it was just a matter of executing it perfectly. It was... not really fun at all, and it's that kind of thing I typically think of when people complain about a scenario being a puzzle rather than a strategy game. I think it's partly a terminology problem; I'd consider Scribblenauts a "puzzle" game, for instance, but the whole point of that game is nonlinear problem solving; in the DS version, at least, they *require* you to solve each level three different ways (or was it five?) before you've actually "beaten" it. Personally, "paint-by-numbers" is my go-to phrase for the kind of scenario we're talking about; the one-answer "read the mind of the level designer and then execute that perfectly" scenario.

I never played very far in it, but of all things Force Commander had some promising elements; it had units you could carry over between missions, it was a "prestige"-based system, you could name units, there was unit experience and structure capture... Of course it also had the Vader theme with a backbeat, so YMMV.

Have you played the Dune board game? It's pretty awesome if you can get 6 people together. Six sides, and fairly assymetric sides. For example, at the beginning of the game, the Bene Geserit player writes down the name of a player and a turn, and puts that face down on the table. If that player wins on that turn, the Bene Geserit player wins instead. The Guild put their troops on the planet at half price, and when anyone else puts troops on the planet they pay the Guild player; if the game goes 12 turns with no winner, the Guild wins. It's a very good game that plays very quickly.

Would you want him to be? One of the reasons why this podcast is actually interesting is that all the people involved bring their own perspective and ideas, and they often don't entirely agree. I'd listen to a podcast by any one of the 3MA regulars, but fortunately I usually get to listen to several of them concurrently.

There was mention in the episode of cutscenes where the action between battles was badly disjointed from your capabilities in the game. I think Blizzard still holds the prize for that, and they've been the heavyweight champions of it since at least Warcraft 2. The classic go-to example of this for me is in fact in Warcraft 2. There's a brief little cutscene, it's perhaps all of 20 seconds long. A human soldier sneaks up on an orc soldier who is manning an orc catapult, stealth-kills the orc, and uses the catapult to shoot down a goblin zeppelin. - nothing in the game did stealth - units just had aggro range; come in range, get attacked - the human soldier couldn't instant kill anything in the game - catapults weren't manned units - you couldn't capture units in the game - catapults can't shoot air units in the game - catapults don't single-shot kill anything either Picky? Sure, but what was going on in the cutscene looked like a lot more fun than the actual game was (since IIRC at that point in the campaign progression the game was basically a bad logging simulator), and absolutely nothing that happened in that cutscene was an action the player could take. The scene in Starcraft where Kerrigan (sp?) is captured was sited as good in-mission storytelling, but at least for me it was the most ignoble failure of in-game storytelling I've ever seen. Literally. I came into that map cold, I hadn't read any faqs (which were kind of a new idea back then, and pretty thin on the ground) or talked to my friends, I knew nothing about it. I think the first time I played it I screwed up a bit and accidentally got line of sight onto the zerg base you were supposed to be protecting, and I killed something and lost that round. Fair enough. I'd been building up a force by it because with the cheesebag tactics Blizzard's level designers usually use, I knew at some point the mission objectives would change and I'd be trying to fight a zerg rush coming downhill at me. Chekhov's gun and all that. The second time I played, same tactics, but I was a little more careful. So, lots of normal siege tanks near the base, a force of battleships in the air just out of range, lots full bunkers, lots of missile towers, some fighters and so forth. I managed to get between the protoss and one of their major resource points before they'd done much to it. When I'd nearly wiped out the protoss base, I stopped and started building up a second base and getting my forces ready for a battle royale. Kerrigan was at the second base surrounded by 24 battleships, in case the first line fell; I was expecting it to be a mess and I was flush with resources from looting the protoss. When I was ready, I killed the last solitary protoss pylon, since I figured that was the trigger. When it was about to die, I threw all my tanks into artillery mode and moved the battleships into firing range. The fog of war peeled back, and it was a massacre. The zerg barely made it down the ramp. I had so much firepower in place that the zerg base was swept clean in a matter of seconds. My guns stopped firing, the creep started decaying away. Total victory. At that point, when it hadn't told me the mission was over yet, I sent some builders to start putting up missile towers on the remains of the zerg base, so I could keep visibility up there. I'd managed to get visual coverage of most of the map, but I wondered if maybe there was some part of the map I couldn't see where some new base was being set up. And then some voiceover starts screaming about being overrun and the base being destroyed, and Kerrigan, who's half a map away in an untouched fortress and surrounded by enough battleships to haul the whole planet to safety, starts demanding to know where the evacuation ships are. There is still not a living zerg unit on the map, and in fact most of the remains have even rotted away, but nope, the game doesn't care. Emperor Snide T Dolchstoss comes on the horn and says "So, you know how everything about my one-dimensional characterization said I'd betray you at my first convenience even if it made no sense and was possibly even counter to my goals?". Kerrigan gets captured by magic plot fairies and here's a nice big slap in the face for trying. Branching campaigns were a well established idea by the time Starcraft came out; as far as I can tell the strictly linear campaign of Starcraft was because they really wanted to tell you a specific story. Which would have been unfortunate but somewhat forgivable if the story hadn't been unusually execrable even for an RTS. There were other examples of this kind of thing in Starcraft, but to me the mission where Kerrigan gets captured no matter what you do was the low point, the most glaring illustration of nearly (only nearly; the level wasn't a single answer puzzle, at least) everything that is wrong with RTS campaigns.

The great thing about this, of course, is that because we're dealing with code we can actually make these more than clever fakery. The oracles (and psychics and astrologers and so forth) generally had to rely on the fact that people want to find connections and there are so many things you can connect that any vague prophecy can be justified ex post facto. If Galba hadn't happened to have been 73, something else that happened to be countable as 73 would have been used as the explanation. The oracles were pretty good at playing that game. When the whole world is driven by code, though, the game could have a force of 73 legions show up on the 7th month of the 3rd year after the "prophecy", lead by 73 generals each of whom was 73 years old. Rather than relying on a con based on people wanting to believe, a game can tell you (as vaguely or exactly as it wants) what is going to happen, and then arrange for it to actually happen. No matter how ludicrously impossible. I do think the interesting idea of disruption, though, is when it really does force you to reconsider your strategy. I think that does need to happen randomly, because if the system is taking the state of the game world into consideration when making the decision to cause a disruption it becomes something you can game, and therefore potentially becomes part of your overall strategy. If you knew, for example, that if medicine stockpiles fall below a certain level worldwide in a game of Europa Universalis it would cause a zombie apocalypse, you might actually try to make it happen. There's a classic example of this kind of thing in the original Command & Conquer. I don't remember the exact details because I wasn't as much of a C&C player as my colleagues at the time, but it went something like this: If you lose your base in C&C, the first crate you find will always be a base construction vehicle. If you deploy a construction vehicle, it becomes a base. If you sell it, you get an engineer who can capture a building. So what my colleagues would do when playing against each other is, right at the beginning of the game, deploy their base building vehicle into a base, sell it to get the engineer, and then run around with the engineer looking for (1) a crate, to get their base vehicle back, and (2) another player's base. Once they found another player's base, usually that player hadn't had time to build any defences yet, so the engineer goes in and takes over their base unopposed. Game over player 2. That's admittedly more abusing rubber banding than it is abusing disruptive events, but the thinking behind it is similar. Any mechanism available to players for manipulation becomes fair game for strategic use. Truly disruptive events need to come out of the blue. On the other hand, as you suggest, that's totally compatible with a prophecy or adviser system. Practically speaking, "the world is going to change in 5 turns" is every bit as disruptive as "the world just changed". You just have a little longer to deal with the consequences before they arrive.

I think this is a case of "that's the game", though; there isn't really much strategy to roguelikes so much as there is (nearly?) endless firefighting and crisis management. Which can be very fun; don't get me wrong, I've been having fun with roguelikes since Gateway to Apshai and Sword of Fargoal were new. But I don't think you can really call what happens in them "disruptions", because they don't make you re-evaluate anything. At its core a roguelike is a sequence of unrelated semirandom crises each of which may have some strategic solution internally, but which will only affect your future decisions in so much as the resolution of any given crisis strengthens or weakens your hand.

I wonder about the possibility of positive disruption. As I recall, in an episode about one of the Paradox grand strategy games (was it EU? Crusader Kings? Victoria? I can't recall...) something was said about how you could be presented with opportunities that were so potentially lucrative that they made you seriously consider throwing your strategy overboard or at least sidetracking it. Rather than a disaster, a game could potentially present the players with something potentially disruptively beneficial. Along similar lines, I think the problem with disruptive change as discussed in this episode is that it tends to be expressed in stats and force deployment. You lose units, or there is a penalty on some stat or group of stats. I think a potentially more interesting direction to take disruption is in the direction of capabilities. Maybe there was something you could do before that you now can't do, either for a little while or for the rest of the game (Blight wipes out the crops forever; you can buy food, but you can't grow it any more. Deal with it.). Or maybe there's something you can do now, but it replaces something you used to be able to do (sea-skimming missile launching unmanned drones make submarines the only practical water vessel). Or perhaps you simply gain a new ability. Or the rift valley between you and your main enemy becomes a saltwater sea. It would probably be most interesting in a game where your abilities were modified or honed by events. The disruption could be rare, but when it occurs you lose two abilities and gain one more powerful ability. Maybe (say, in a somewhat crazed WW1 game) a contrivance of events leaves you unable to build artillery or heavy infantry, but you gain fast zeppelin dropships carrying cavalry. Suddenly your hold on your trenches is much weaker and the front is liable to be overrun, but you can hit your hard opponent in places they thought were completely safe. So now he's desperately trying to scrounge together a home guard while his industry burns, and you're trying to destroy his infrastructure before he can kick his way to your capitol. I think that's the kind of place where disruption could really work, and I think this could feed into a solution to the snowballing problem and the midgame stagnation problem. Use disruption to break the symmetry in stagnant situations. I don't know if this episode is going to affect my current design, but it's certainly got me thinking about it. Keep up the good work, guys.

Thanks for the suggestions and links!

That was a good panel; I wish I could have attended. It would be nice to hear some more discussion on UIs, actually; for example, whereas Battle of the Bulge seems to strike a good balance between hiding information and burying the screen in it, there is the other end of the spectrum where everything you want to do is nested several menus deep. There's also the classic capability problem, especially in real-time games; the AI doesn't have to use the UI. This shows up spectacularly in RTS games, where the AI can be adjusting orders instantaneously across the entire map while the player can only operate on the things they can see (or hotkey select) and the locations that are currently visible. Another example of this would be Sacrifice, where the AI leaders could splash spells around far more effectively than the player because they didn't need to navigate pie menus to choose spells and then manually target them. There's the question of good UI design for people with vision impairment as well; I remember a pitch meeting where we were showing an RTS on a handheld device to a producer at THQ, where most of the action took place on a zoomed-out map with iconic units (due to screen size contstraints, mostly). It turned out he was colorblind, and couldn't tell (IIRC) full-saturation cyan from full-saturation magenta, so it was just a sea of identical icons. The sides were indiscernable to him. Or a friend of mine who's fully color blind but could play Puzzle Bobble (or Bust A Move, if you like) competetively because the little bubbles also had unique shapes in them; he was matching moons and stars instead of matching blues and greens. I'd really enjoy a podcast episode (maybe even multipart) on the synthesis of complexity management, UI, and games that teach themselves.

Font licensing is all over the place, but for games (often) the main thing to consider is whether you're going to be drawing the font directly from source (ie: using freetype or OS font calls) or whether you're going to be baking glyphs into a texture and rendering text with textured quads. If you ship the source font (truetype or whatever) with your game you normally need a distribution license, which is usually prohibitive; it's typically a per-unit-sold rate, probably several times the sale price of your game. The assumption is that every copy of the game you sell includes a usable copy of the font which you're effectively reselling to the game buyer. For most font designers, if you ship only rasterized versions of the font (ie: texture pages with glyphs), you don't need a distribution license, only a commercial use license, and that's usually a flat one-time fee that's south of $100. Things differ between different font designers; I know some developers who are terrified to go near anything that might be within reach of Monotype's legal department, for example. Always talk to the designer and make sure the license is ironed out; most font designers are one-person-shows or small shops, so you'll have plenty of common ground for understanding. Explain to them what you want to do; I've had nothing but good experiences with font designers so far, and have had no trouble getting an unambiguous license for in-game use at a reasonable price. Of course, our games are all using pre-rasterized fonts, which makes the discussion easier. It's arguably best to go that way anyways, at least for the near term. If you have access to non-pc platforms (consoles, mobile...) or want to port to multiple platforms with a minimum of friction, texture-based fonts make a giant pile of hassles go away. Do be careful of free font sites. Perhaps things have changed, but for a while there were a lot of repackaged non-free commercial fonts floating around masquerading as free fonts; typically they were Adobe Postscript fonts that had been run through ps->ttf converters and had the copyright strings stripped. As a developer, you want to be able to point to a license if someone's legal department comes knocking. That said, it does look like a lot of the fonts on fontsquirrel are fonts I know are properly free. That site looks legit to me, and maybe it's all you really need if you can find something that has the look you want.

If possible, could we please have the slides in pdf? I can't speak for others, but I don't have Office (and am not usually running Windows), and my experience with other powerpoint players has not been hugely positive...

I've finished listening to the episode now; it's kind of funny that release lag means the recording predated the resignation of Riccitello, given Rob's worries about the investor call of doom. I don't think that's an unfounded fear. I think there's justifyable worry that we'll see EA focus on freemium and established franchises, which is another way of saying "stripmining our user base for the benefit of the next fiscal quarter". Or "gee, this seed corn is really tasty, and it's right here, we don't have to do any of that sowing and harvesting crap to get it..." I haven't played recent Sim City games myself; I burned out on them back around whichever version got the General MIDI Patchset "smooth jazz" soundtrack. I've played various of the other games mentioned today, though, and I've quite enjoyed Tropico 4. I have to agree, though, in Tropico I always wind up playing as the benevolent despot; I find myself being naturally nice if there isn't a compelling gameplay reason not to be, and if there were I'm not sure I'd be inclined to keep playing. It was a good episode.

Seconded. For that matter, there are so many current and past space 4X games out there that there's multiple episodes of topics waiting to be mined.