hexgrid

This podcast keeps making me want to fill holes in my collection. Well, except for last week's show; I think I'm giving the new Rome a wide berth. : ) I missed Gettysburg when it came out. It looks like at this point if I don't get lucky in a garage sale I'm looking at $150, or trying my luck with offers that sound suspiciously like the publisher will be "Maxell" or "Verbatim". Is this a windows game, or is it something that dosbox would handle?

Worth noting: on iOS, the built-in turn-based game support is somewhat straitjacketed; a lot of the implementation problems (including things like the incredibly primitive matchmaking, and things like timeouts) in games stem from bad assumptions in the way the Game Center async turn-based API was designed. As an example that's currently biting me, there's no sane way to do simultaneous turns. In the system provided, it's always some designated player's turn, and remains so until either (1) they end their turn, or (2) they are timed out by the (Apple-run) server. Only the player whose turn it is can actually make changes in the game.[1] What this means is that if you want simultaneous turns, you wind up still having sequential turns, but have players ganging up and passing on a bag full of orders, all of which get resolved at once when they get back to the player who took the first "turn". [1] iOS 7 adds a slight change to this to allow things like trading, but at least according to my reading all it allows is for the player whose turn it is to interact with other players without abusing the turn order. That is, it makes Settlers of Catan-style trading possible with less insanity.

If you're ever stuck for episode ideas, it would be worth going through the back catalog of episodes and doing "on further consideration" followups. Time considerations mean I'm sure some ideas were left on the floor in the earlier episodes, and I'm also sure ideas have developed and minds have changed since.

Seconded. It's a problem space I don't think games have explored nearly as fully as the "clash of god-emperors" space.

I've got a design in the pipe dealing with that on a smaller scale; once the current project breaks the surface I'm hoping to be able to talk about it more, but it's an idea I find fascinating as well. Unless you want to accept some sort of super-advanced physics, there's more than a year of one-way communications lag between here and the nearest star, which (by analogy) actually puts things more or less back to the early colonial days in terms of the pressures placed on command structures and logistics. You can't just send a boat full of troops to Alpha Centauri when you hear the colony has risen in revolt; the war will be over before the troops get halfway there. Even with magic physics and faster than light travel, I think there's a lot of interesting game design territory in communications and travel lag time, especially if they differ.

Have a gander at Papers Please: http://dukope.com/ I haven't tried it, but it puts you in the role of a border guard/customs officer in a small autocratic country. It sounds like what you're looking for. Also (similarly) Cart Life: http://www.richardhofmeier.com/cartlife/

I think the 3MA episode about it got to the heart of the matter when they were talking about the problems games have simulating irrational action. If you put a player in charge of Nazi Germany, they almost certainly aren't going to start death camps and begin murdering their own citizens because it simply doesn't make any rational sense to do so. Morality aside, it's a massive, pointless waste of resources and personnel. If you try to force it on the player, (1) it's going to chase people away from your game, and (2) it raises the whole question of why you can control every policy decision in your country except the one involving pogroms. The only way to make people do it would be to provide some bonus to the player for taking that irrational action, but the resulting game would be reprehensible and ahistoric. I think a game can provide moral choice to the player. The problem in the case of strategy games, however, is that the moral quandaries are often totally orthogonal to the strategic choices. There are some exceptions, like the classic "Purge the army?" question that often comes up for the Russian player in strategic WW2 games or the question of how prisoners of war are treated, but for the most part the moral decisions you'd like to reach back into history and undo were bad ideas both morally and strategically.

It is, but would you want to deal with that? I suspect it would put reasonable people off, and the people who enjoyed it would not be the sort of people I'd want to cater to. A one-off built for shock value (like that game where you're loading trains and they only tell you at the end that you're loading people to send them to death camps) can work, but I think that game is instructive; I doubt most people play it many times. You could make the same argument about ahistorical games. Given the way (for example) the humans operate in StarCraft, there are probably all sorts of atrocities going on; the fiction certainly sets up personalities and political structures that imply it. Don't they have a moral obligation to put those in camera? But can you imagine the outcry and the damage to sales if they did? The episode you mention covers a lot of ground on the subject and does so quite well, as usual.

I have to admit I find the idea of this type of game with a science fiction theme to be a compelling idea, though it would take a lot of work to make it feel authentic and different. I don't think I'd be interested if it was just a coat of paint to make Space Europe. Interestingly, though, when you blow things up to galactic scale, you run into some of the same kinds of problems they had in the pre-modern era; the speed of communications and travel make it hard to maintain direct control over distant elements of your empire, including your generals.

Just wait 'til we have the episode on Rymdkapsel...

Yeah, the autoreplace is kind of creepy. I'm not particularly happy to have my posts rewritten.

Fair enough. I'm thinking I'll hold out until everything is on sale in a bundle. I put a lot of hours into civ5, but I'm not really feeling the need to go back to it yet even with the improvements. I find after a while with the civ games the static tech tree starts to annoy the heck out of me, and it doesn't sound like BNW changes that.

Does one need to purchase G&K to have BNW? I skipped G&K, and am not sure I want to lay down $60 for an expansion pack.

There's a lot of good stuff on older consoles, though you can have a lot of it on emulators these days. There are things I miss from the hardware of that era. Instant boot. No loud fans. Games hadn't ossified into genres yet, so there was a lot more experimentation. Computers that were programmable by default, without having to buy a compiler suite or join a developer program. That said, the indie renaissance is helping with the game design problem, I don't miss floppy drives at all, I'd hate to try to live without the internet, and any of the computers sitting around me right now probably has more computing power and storage than the entire world did when the Vic20 shipped. Possibly even with the C64 shipped. One thing that seems to be trying to bring back the best of the 80s home computer era is the Raspberry Pi.

As I recall, the main complaints with MOO3 are that the game is a complex mess of systems that don't interlock properly, and that the AI is like a babe in the woods. It's been too long since I've played it to site chapter and verse, though.

Could be, or it could be a British thing; Canadian culture diverged from British culture rather later and less severely than the US did, and though we're now more affected by US culture than by British culture we're still somewhat in the middle. I'm not sure where it came from, but my guess would be it's from a console background; historically game consoles didn't have operating systems in the traditional sense, and the game itself was effectively the operating system. Sega arguably changed that, at least in perception if not in practice; every Sega console from the SegaCD onwards had an "OS". I use quotes because it was a pretty stripped down OS, mostly for dealing with system settings and to let you play CDs and the like, but it was kind of an OS, and if you popped the disk out of the machine it would return to the OS. Pretty much everyone in the console space went to that system once games started coming on disks, even the cartridge-based machines. These days, your PS3, Wii or 360 is running a reasonable approximation of a full OS. But back in the 8 bit and 16 bit days, when you put a cartridge in and turned the machine on, you were literally booting a game.

I haven't tried it, but it's currently 33% off in the big steam sale if that affects your decision...

There's no need (IMO) to be defensive about discussing a game like this on a strategy podcast. Between the squad-level tactics and the subject matter, it's well within the scope of the podcast. I occasionally wonder how much further the infrastructure will need to progress before we can do a game like this on a truly epic scale; Iwo Jima was (referencing Wikipedia here...) 22K Japanese defenders vs. 70K American attackers. Put a command layer on top, let the defenders fortify before the attack comes, let the attackers have recon info and plan the assault... there's an MMO I'd actually play.

I could swear you guys had the same argument about the pronunciation of "Eugen" in the W:EE podcast. Oddly, it seems like Eugen's website hasn't been told about Ruse, let alone anything they've done since. I haven't played this game yet, but I'm starting to wonder if perhaps this branch of RTS games should be moving more in the direction of Sins of a Solar Empire; it sounds like they would benefit from a more majestic pace.

The original metaphor was referring to sunlight. The later, darker take on the metaphor was an oncoming train, originally alluding to a hopeful situation going sour. So, whichever you like, really.

Was it worth playing? Has anyone tried it on a modern PC?

To expand on the 7 Cities of Gold idea, I think it would potentially be interesting to have a game where you were trying to build a rail empire, but where the area you were trying to build it into was largely unknown. Maybe you know that somewhere way over west there was a gold strike, or maybe rumors of faster access to spices. Maybe (spot the Canadian...) you're trying to get a railway out there to prove you can get troops there fast enough to maintain your claim on it, whatever "it" turns out to be. For whatever reason, you (and potentially your competitors) are striking out into the unknown and trying to steamroll infrastructure over whatever you find.

There was an early question about the appeal of trains in the podcast; as someone with a couple of small kids, I think I can provide an answer for that one, at least on one level. Trains are appealing for the same reason aircraft, ships, panzers, farm equipment and construction machinery are; they are huge machines that do big things. It's a combination of awe and power fantasy. The music interludes were nice, though for my tastes they could be shorter; as an audio shorthand for "subtopic change", 5 or 6 seconds is plenty. I don't think I've played any train games since the 8 bit days, and I'm thinking that perhaps I'm missing out. They raise interesting gameplay possibilities; one thing I don't think was explicitly mentioned (though it was implied several times) is that competing train lines can't cross, at least not without special dispensation from the geography. The zero sum nature (there's a fixed amount of cargo to deliver at any given time, only one train can handle any given unit of cargo) means there is strong scope for competition. The point that was made about player decisions changing the map is a vital one as well, and the economic sim on top is icing. I definitely like the idea of Iron Dragon; the mechanics of the train game interest me far more than the historical minutia. I'm more interested in the stats and how they affect the game than I am in (say) whether it's the Short or Long variant of the Peter Witt. I wonder if you could make a kind of "7 Cities of Gold" meets "Iron Dragon"? Hmm....

The grand tragedy of Homeworld was that it was (reputedly, at least) green-lit on the basis of a whiteboard presentation. It was critically acclaimed, and though flawed (I don't know about you, but I found combat a little hard to manage once things really got moving), a pretty good actual game. Despite that, IIRC it didn't meet sales expectations, and it was pretty much the death knell for whiteboard pitches. It was one of those watersheds in the industry, like the Ripping Friends game, where after it happened publishers wouldn't touch anything like it with a barge pole. Once the numbers on Homeworld were in, if you didn't have a vertical slice demo alongside your pitch the publishers (at least the ones I talked to) weren't interested.

I'm mildly surprised there was no mention of the pacific campaign as a potential setting. I would have thought the Pacific theater would be perfect; the island battles are all largely self-contained, on maps which (for infantry, at least) have very rigid borders.