ilitarist

Please do. At least one 4-people purchase is at stake.

With Agressive Expansion you can at least argue only specific subset of players needs it - the ones who go for World Conquest. In CK2 map is useless and unergonomic for most of the time. Oh let me tell you how I spend 20 minutes transfering vassals after inheriting Francia as Charlemagne. You could think they could somehow highlight selected vassal's domain on map or even allow you to select what vassal to transfer to some duke by just clicking neighboring county, not scrolling through list of cunts.

CK2 always had wrong interface. It was always developed as not the game people have played. They've started to talk about it but weren't cruel enough. Paradox thought that people would want another grand strategy and added many mechanics people didn't need. And this core still limits the game. Why do you want to see the map all the map? It only represents millitary and technology mechanics. When you think about economics - every province is really 1-7 economical units. The province may have unlimited number of characters - those guy who really matter. They didn't even update map when it was obvious it's inefficient: they could add ruler portrait on top of country instead of country name which means nothing. And spouses, and heirs. The map is tacked on upon the game. Or, say, intrigue screen has tiny window into a list of personal decisions which was not enough to contain stuff you need even after couple of expansions. And vice versa: look at buildings. Have you ever read any AAR where those buildings were important? No surprise they didn't touch buildings ever. And no person in the world understands how combat works, no one bases decisions on it. Other issues hurt too like game being too fast. You never remember all those special snowflakes. Feudal and religion systems are not as developed as you can hope (why can't we have alliances between different religions or personal conversion a la Lithuania?). But those are design decisions. Building the game based on grand strategy template was clear limitation. I hope CK3 will look more like Mount&Blade instead of EU3.

I feel there are games where you are supposed to be good and where you supposed to be less bad. In, say, Civilization it's fairly easy to learn not to do stupid things. You will still do those - send unguarded settler, built unnecessary building - but those are minor things. You have perfect control of your side and it fulfills your will. Even if you're crap strategist you'll look decent by just not doing stupid things. In RTS like StarCraft you can't hope to control your side on the same level. You will never fulfill your potential. As Protoss I can boost building production ever 25 seconds per Nexus. First half of the game I should constantly produce workers. I have to build buildings and troops on schedule. I have to move those over map. I have to build expansions. I don't believe even Korean gosu on drags has the same level of control over his SC2 race as you have over your race in Civilization - or even Company of Heroes for that matter as this game has relatively low limits on number of units you can have. SC2 is made to be unplayable mess, like Distant Worlds without AI automation. So in multiplayer I can of course win by smart air attack on enemy defenseless land units or by daring expansion in unexpected region. But it always feels like you're barely controlling this mess. Perfectionist and completionist in me suffers for that and wants to use suboptimal strategies like using units with minimal micromanage capabilities (I won't have time for those anyway) and attacking only in big formation (I won't be able to manipulate several armies effectively because I have to maintain economy).

Valorian Endymion, good points about franchises stagnating without competition. I feel Total War is kinda competing with Paradox games - this must be the reason they're insisting on adding increasingly complex broken economy and diplomacy systems to their games. And both Rome TW and Heroes 3 cast shadow over whole franchises. I hope Master of Orion 2 won't affect new Master of Orion as much. Heroes 5, for example, is a good game (at least after two expansions) but it would be always compared to older titles which had better campaigns and... I honestly can't name any other thing that was better in Heroes 3 - maybe music? Imagine being a developer for a franchise like this. It's enough to make a mediocre game to get good sales. Yet even if you make a really good game fans and critics will whine about good old games and find some special charm in witch's hut giving Eagle Eye skill.

Some of you guys had perfectly explained why Total War feels so uncomfortable: because of fear of hitting "Next Turn" button. Same goes for battles, of course: the game constantly taunts you with the autoresolve button which saves you 15 minutes of your life (5 of which is loading and 10 is seeing how impotent is AI without a numerical advantage) by killing a hundred more people. EU4 is a good example of a good sequel. EU3 become bloated after all of those DLCs. All those systems where tacked on existing ones, not so much integrated into the systems. Remember national focuses, provincial decisions, religious decisions? Those features existed in a vacuum, no one remembers them. Others were made lighter and less micromanage-ish. Exactly to escape fan backlash devs had kept some of obscure nation-specific mechanics like Chinese factions. EU4 feels a little bloated after Common Sense but I hope they integrate all this development stuff better so that I don't have some Burgundian city as 10 times better province than London.

I'm surprised Rob had problems with this game. All hail Rob. I had a single walkthrough on Normal difficulty. Often I've felt I've screwed up - lost Alchemist class, didn't understand how territory bonuses worked, only got to the end with 2 relics - but the final battle was beatable on Iron Man. It was interesting to play as an Iron Man challenge but I don't feel there's enough depth in this game for another walkthrough. I still plan to do XCOM for the third time (and perhaps more when Long War comes out of beta) but not Massive Chalice.

Nah, what Sid Meier was talking about is more of programmer having more fun than player. You can write interesting game with complex calculations and deep systems. You look at your code and systems and you're euphoric cause look at all those great algorithms. In reality it's mostly about inderect control games and arkane systems player is not supposed to understand. Like Distant Worlds. Or Victoria 2 economy: you will never understand how it works and why stuff happens but it's part of the messagee about V2 era.

Great episode. Very interesting discussion about tactical battles in 4X games. Reminded me of the following. I have a friend you'd call non-gamer. He likes WW2 so sometimes he plays historical strategies about it. When we were kid he played games everybody played like GTA3 or Morrowind. Sometimes I show him something new and hip. Like Witcher 2 - showed it mainly for the graphics. My friend looks at several minutes of gameplay and cinematographic dialog. Then he points at some character and asks "Can you kill him"? Killing everybody in RPG or open-world game is one of those features people think they want. It's a feature that gives you limitless possibilities. Gives you a promise of something bigger. The game gives you weapons and says you can kill monsters. What if I try to use this thing you call weapon on civilians? If the game says you can't that you know you don't have a real weapon or real control over your character. In the same veijn in a grand strategy you have armies and plots of land that are not everything that was just a number and small tile of land transforms into standing armies on complex terrain. Now you know that those people and those lands really exist. In Rome Total War they had feature showing your city in 3D the same as it would look in siege battle. It served no purpose but the guy who added it understood that people needed that. It made cities real places - just like similar feature in Civilization 1-3. People need this zoom in to believe in those worlds. Even if battles are not that important world jut becomes real. Even if I think tactical battles are bad idea I understand psychological factors that made people want it.

Nah, everyone was preparing for war. They've tested their equipment and doctrines in real wars. This is one of the reasons everyone wanted to participate in Spanish civil war - to test how your new shiny toys work in real situation. Soviets had Winter War but it was very different from traditional war.

Interesting example. Supply was indeed extremely important. Germans may have better cans but still they "forgot" to pack winter gear on the Eastern Front and they didn't have special tank engines for quite some time and used airplane engines. And German uberscience is horrible myth. It grows from thinking that it's easier to do science when you have no moral limits. This may be true but those German scientists who had no problem with freezing people to death as an experiment turned out to be bad scientists - basically experimenting on starving depressed death camp prisoners is not that useful. And German engineers, mathematicians and other guys would not benefit from no morals that much. V2 guy murdered 12000 people while making those rockets (meanwhile rockets themselves killed less than 9000 peoplle) but in a normal state he'd have qualified well fed workers with the same results. In 1939 - even before the war - number of German college students was just 40% of the same number in 1933. Whole disciplines (most noticable - Math) were destroyed because Jews were banished from universities. Nazis were irrational and anti-science, but we remember them as high-tech because of propaganda and being the most experienced army in the beginning of WW2. Plus Hitler could be easily persuaded to dump money into some impractical projects like that V2 one. As soon as allies got their shit together they've achieved much more significant technological feats.

They didn't have better stuff in a gameplay sense (even though I remember CoD2 was in fact a commercial for MG42) but the story was often about some sort of wunderwaffle. Less serious games like Wolfenstein had occult themes but even Medal of Honor had missions where you had to destroy V2 rockets or something like that.

In every game review episode Rob says he's great at this specific game. All hail Rob. He also says that he likes the game more than others. All hail Rob. Is there a link between mastery and liking the game? Does Rob use any special technics to master all those game so quick? All hail Rob.

It's partly for gameplay reasons too. You need different sides so you enforce tropes. Nazi are all about quality, Soviets are about quantity. It's also good for games like Panzer General: AI can be rather passive just standing there and your elite Panzer divisions obliterate Soviets even though they have numerical advantage. You've got power fantasy (your units are better), challenge (there are more of them), no microcontrol (your army is small) and passive reactive AI (the one that your average programmer can actually write). And now even though developer may not think 1 German is as strong as 3 Soviets he tempted to reinforce the trope. He can't just say that both sides on the Eastern Front were rather ineffective, had idiots in command, horrible supply problems and treated their own soldiers poorly. You need famous Germans without winter gear while Soviets attack with 1 rifle for 3 men. Still Nazi fetishism is rather disturbing thing. Especially with many famous Nazi inventions not being effective at all like V2 rocket.

It's not the first time Rob raises this Company of Heroes 2 controversy issue. Yet every time it feels he doesn't end up saying what he wants to say there. As I see it main problem with CoH2 portrayal of Soviet armies was that it was the second installment of the series. It just looked weird that after CoH1, a tale about noble brave men fighting each other in honourable and manly fasion we got that horrible Soviets who spoiled a good story with their gritty tragic war pessimism. It was like Remarque appearing in a middle of Captain America Beats Nazis comics. Especially noticable cause Germans were portrayed in the same neutral way with no mentioning of H-word and stuff. Slightly disappointed about discussion sliding down to battle historicity. Every show without Troy should be about Paradox games and this time you had perferct wasted opportunity to talk more about Victoria or how EU4 expansions enforce White Man Burden worldview without being offensive about it.

We're perfectly capable of simulating all of this for a very long time. It doesn't happen not because of performance or creative difficulties but just cause people don't want it. Those who want deep simulations wouldn't notice if, say, War in the East had any sort of 3D visualization. Those who wants nice battles are content with Total War model that hadn't increased sizes of anything since Rome 1 - if you exclude giant empty Empire map. And in TW series all those manuevers do not work because movement and turn system is from something like Heroes of Might and Magic but maps are not as structured as in those kind of games (basically there's not much point in manuevering if enemy has enough movement points to appear from fog of war, walk past your army and capture an empty city). They've changed it in Empire by saying that armies are really huge so you can't move past it and so now their maps are functionally much smaller and more linear than they look so not much maneuvering again.

Simpler Risk map would work. I remember Rome 1 has captured my imagination with governors and generals getting all this retinue and traits so my best general was not just 10 stars guy but promoted captain who became gay and scholar during campaign in Greece. It was probably too interesting and fun to play so they replaced it with sending trade ships to anchor icons and researching tiny icons. They know everybody plays for battles. Anybody who plays for strategy quickly becomes disappointed and departs to Paradox land.

I think I've found what's your problem with Total War. You talk about this turn-based stuff between battles as if it's a strategy game of some sort. To expand on this: as Rob had said many times transition into 3D was never finished properly. Awkward army maneuvers through wide plains never worked properly and were forcefully compensated starting with Empire that stated that armies are actually 500 kilometers wide. And Shogun turned the map into more accurate representation of how ancient people would probably think about it - series of tubes connecting cities. Diplomacy never worked. Economy never worked. The best thing you can do is to use those systems to get those battles. Or hope that one day Creative Assembly will find and exile that evil man who secretly inserts strategic mode features into this games.

About historicity - I also don't like that some incredible events are railroaded. Anschluse and Munchen Deal work automatically in HoI3 while in reality those were risky gambles and many poeple expected for all this Chezh business to trigger what attack on Poland triggered. But history is what player expects to happen so it's actually hard or impossible to fail at those incredible unlikely deeds.

But most countries start game several years before the war. And the war is not gradually more complex like in, say, EU4 or even Civilization, the day the war starts you're operating dozens if not hundreds of units. I've always felt that wargame in HoI crept from behind and shouted "Ha-ha, fooled you!" while I was trying to do grand strategy stuff instead of getting down into general's shoes.

I don't get why Hearts of Iron franchise exists. I don't get what is it trying to do. I've tried HoI2 and HoI3 and both felt like a Frankenstein monster. Is it a game about micromanaging 200 divisions on the Eastern front? Is it a game about involving neutral powers into your struggle? It tried to involve me with detailed research and politics but as soon as the war started it expected me to play the most complicated wargame I ever saw. Just why.

I'm keeping eye on StarDrive 2 and hoping to get it once I get bored of Endless Legend (realistic) and Civilization 4 (not realistic) or it's on sale (very realistic). I'm kind of surprised it has no alternative victory conditions. Isn't there a rule 4X should have those? How can you copy Master of Orion and miss this important feature?

I'd also add that Steam doesn't force you to send statistics. Judging by achievements for various games high percentage of people either doesn't even play their games or use it in offline mode because of superstitions or privacy. Also previous stats are lie. Yesterday Steam had 9 millions of concurrent players. It's much more than what LoL has - they have as much unique visitors per day.

Very interesting. I've played LoL for couple of years and tried HotS. When I've listened to the show I didn't even think anyone may not know some of the mentioned terms. And I have problem with wargaming shows cause sometimes I don't understand if its boardgame or Video game up till the end of the show!.. But I've still bought Unity of Command, yeah. I've heard many interesting ideas and facts in this show so I guess it's just for those who already play HotS.+

Great episode, many interesting points. Indeed, Paradox games often feel like midgame cut out of some Civilization game. Most of the world is already inhabited, powers are established - but it rarely reaches point when some single power can control everything. On the other hand it means you have to already be experienced player to "get" those games: Civilization and similar games start you with a single city/unit and complexity rises gradually, in EU4/CK2 you may start as a big country and will be immediately buried under mechanics and details - and if you start your first game as something manageable like Ulm you will soon be exterminated. This is important point in 4X popularity: even 1st time player envisions his future great empire while he only has to do simple tasks like scouting and choosing between granary and barracks. Great point about mods - and the same can be said about indie games. I know Arcen games have unique mechanics. Some of them are highly replayable. And they're relatively cheap. But still I have Civ4 and Civ5 and I know those games have great UX, they're balanced by millions of testing hours and they have community patches to balance and enhance them even more. I know that I should take Civ4 or similar game to uninhabited island - by the way, what do you think one should take? Some breakthrough indie titles like AI War may get fan support and years of testing, balancing and enhancing the game. The Last Federation will probably get the same treatment. But I know that most of those small games like Star Rulers, Star Drives etc will only be interesting as exploring new game mechanics - and most probably those mechanics would be remake of MoO2 because we can't make space 4X without remaking MoO2, can we? So you get a glorified tutorial, which is only nice in case of games like Endless series - the ones with good UI and great aesthetics. As Robert had said, we are not even sure if this is a good strategy. Mods and indie games are guaranteed to not be "good strategies", even the most developed ones like Fall from Heaven 2 do not even pretend they have competitive AI. So perhaps gamers like Robert Zacny - the ones who are great players able to quickly see through mechanics and "understand" and "win" complex games much sooner than average players - may have time for mods and small games. Or players who particulary interested in franchises like Star Wars/Trek can delve into some thematic mods. We simple mortals have those great games that take hundreds of hours to feel "completed". And perhaps this is why genre does not evolve. You could play 100 hours in Half-Life and its clones and you got fed up, you master all those systems and after that it's all about patience and reaction and perhaps psychology. This is why Half Life 2 coming just 5 years later differs from its predecessor more than Civ5 differs from Civ1 which came out 20 years before.