Video Game Chat: Total War: Rome II

I am a big fan of Rome Total War and I would recommend you skipping its sequel.

I could ramble on but I'll stick to a few simple points instead.  You can read my review of the original here.

So, this sequel was 9 years in the making and Creative Assembly has made several games in the series in the mean time.  How did they do?

The Good
The graphics are beautiful and the unit cards are lovely in their stylized designs.  (Although, my top-of-the-line video card can't handle it when it rains on the battle field or when towers tumble in a siege.  I guess they were future proofing by designing for next-gen video cards?)

The ahistoric units are gone.

The Bad
The AI is as stupid as it ever was.  I've had several computer-run generals do suicide runs into me when the rest of their army had not even engaged yet.  (the computer is obviously using them because they are cavalry.  Can CA not flag generals as a special kind of last-use cavalry or something?)  I've had the computer attack a walled city and then sit there without moving until the battle runs out.  Because I had battle time limits set at an hour back then I had to alt-tab out and surf the web while I waited for them to lose the battle they initiated!  I've had an enemy general in a city I was conquering sit at a capture point with a superior force while I won the city at a different capture point. Stooopiiid.

Also, in the original, if you attacked a city without a siege unit (or elephants) that could break down a gate you lost automatically.  Not so in this game where any unit can throw Molotov cocktails and burn down your city gates.  This makes having walls much less useful and means you still have to put big garrisons in walled cities if they are threatened.

Diplomacy seems just as weak.  Everyone hates you and no one wants to engage in money-making, growth-making trade with you because they hate you.  Even though that money and trade now might help them conquer you later.

The Ugly
They took away one of the most fun things of the original -- the families and their hangers-on.  Oh, there are generals but every turn is a year.  It takes 7 years to raise a full army, several years to pacify a newly conquered city.  It takes several years to travel from city to city.  You are not going to have any Hannibals or Alexander the Greats in this game unless you balls out blitzkrieg.  Your generals will more likely die of old age.  And it doesn't really matter in the end, because there is no family tree.  The generals feel like random dudes that share your family name.  You don't see them grow up, you have no way of anticipating when one will be available.  Hell, I've gone a decade with no one from my family available as a general.  So, if I want to raise an army all the successes and glory of that army will accrue to some other rival family.

(There is still a household, but it is usually just one retainer, they take a year to change and they are very similar with many different retainers offering the same benefit, like,for instance, +5% to morale.)

The way cities work has been completely overhauled.  Now cities matter less than regions.  A region is made up of a capital and one or more minor cities.  The capital can't have agriculture but can hold 6 buildings while the minor cities can have agriculture but only hold 4 buildings.  You need food to build certain buildings but most buildings make everyone unhappy because of squalor.  So the game pretty much is about juggling these buildings.

I can understand this in theory being fun.  But I just have not enjoyed it.  Buildings are expensive and take years to build so destroying them and changing buildings is not an efficient strategy, yet you will often find yourself with either plenty of food but no advancements or with advancements but starving to death with a rebelling populace.  You have to realize that the buildings that fight squalor are far down the tech tree, so for decades of game time everything you build pisses people off, even building up your agriculture causes squalor.  I have taken to leaving all buildings at the last level they don't cause squalor.  So I have a lot of semi-developed cities.

It could be that I just haven't figured out how to play this game the way it is intended to be played.  But for someone who has hundreds of hours in the original (and 140 in this one) that right there is proof that the game is a very different game.  And not much of an argument that fans of the first will like it. 

I'm not opposed to a more dynamic and complicated system of city building, I quite liked the way prosperous cities in Empire Total War would lead to the development of small towns.  But somehow this game makes it painful.  I feel penalized for every change I make and those changes take so long.  I keep going back and trying to play.  But in the end it feels tedious.  I don't understand how in 9 years this is all they managed. 

I think I am going to look to Crusader Kings II (I've played the first one) or Europa Universalis 4 for my strategy fix.  Or, heck, just play the original which I find still holds up pretty well.

Mount & Blade: Warband

This is not a review, more like a love letter.  "Hey Telecanter, where you been? It's the New Year and you haven't posted in like a week!"  I, dear friend, have been absorbed in this game:

You should see me when I lose.

So, here's the deal.  Mount & Blade is a game that has a strategic overland map and when there are conflicts, it zooms into real time tactical battles.  The same set up I love about Rome: Total War.  It is a military skirmish game, though that is underselling it.  It starts off feeling more like a roleplaying game something like the first Diablo.  You start out with little armor, no troops and are dropped into the world to do whatever you want.  But you quickly learn that to make any headway you need troops and that they need to be paid so the early game requires a lot of scrimping and nail biting battles to try and get loot from bandits.

The Game Changes
And by mentioning the early game, I bring up one of the things I love about this game.  More than any other game I've played it feels like D&D in that the game becomes different games as you become more powerful.  Once you have decent armor and weapons and find some companions that have skills that can help you and your troops out, there is a mid game where you are no longer fighting bands of bandits but other military forces.  And eventually if you make your own kingdom, battles won't be the biggest problem but your lazy, greedy vassals.

My steppe archer all grown up.

The first game I played I made a steppe archer and favored agile horses and archery.  But as the stakes got higher and higher I found I was a liability with my light armor.  I would get knocked out of combats which affected my troop morale and would end up losing me battles I should have won.  So I slowly shifted strategy to have heavy armor, heavy war horse, and a lance.

Why Warband?
Before I go any further I should say Warband is just a revision of the preceding Mount and Blade, but a revision worth getting.  It's okay to skip the first one, you'll get to meet all the same companions and have the same quests and Warband gives at least three big reasons to favor it:

• You can found your own kingdom.  (I didn't really want to be a vassal.)
• They added a whole new desert faction.
• They improved the world map immensely.

So Many Possibilities
There are so many things I like about the game it's hard to point them all out.  But the bottom line is it is simple in mechanics but allows for lots of choices and strategies.  Shields take damage and get broken.  You can block with weapons.  There are tons of weapon options from crossbows to polearms.  I mean, Gary would have loved this: there are Bardiche, and pole axes, and pikes.  There are lots or horse options, depending on if you want speed maneuverability, or an armored charging force.

And that's just talking about you and your companions.  Recruiting troops from different faction regions will change your battles too.  The viking-like Nords have no cavalry, the the steppe faction has no troops that aren't mounted.

It Feels Medieval
I'm no historian, but I like that this game feels feudal.  So, you've got yourself a kingdom.  You feel awesome with your veteran troops.  Your castles are well-defended.  And then the neighboring kingdom declares war and razes all you poor villages.  This cuts off your cash flow and all of a sudden you can't afford your army.  You can try and patrol your villages to keep them safe but as your kingdom gets bigger this becomes impossible.  Thus vassals.  Vassals are a weird trade off because you have to give them your villages as fiefs to keep them happy, thus losing the income from the village anyway, but they will help keep down bandits and protect caravans which help the overall economy of your kingdom.  They can also be called to campaign when the next war starts in order to inflict damage on the foe and win new fiefs that will earn you some gold.

Also, there is no death for you, your companions, or lords, only your troops and poor villagers.  This feels very appropriate to me.  I found myself, after having made a foolish mistake utterly crushed in battle, all my veteran troops killed, stripped of almost everything and all the nearby towns and villages hostile.  So I ran away to a foreign land far away and built up an army there.  I still had tons of income from my various economic interests.  Once I had a new army I marched them all the way back home and won back what was "rightfully" mine.

The Little Things
Again it's hard to point out just why the game feels so right to me.  But there are little things that give me the impression the developers paid attention.  When you finally start your own kingdom you get to choose a banner.  But what was so cool was, that banner then appears on the shields of all your troops.  Your targeting reticule, normally white, changes color to be visible in sand or snow.  Lame horses will eventually be healed if you have the appropriate wound healing skill.  If you rescue Peasant Women from bandits, you can actually keep them as troops and they, super weak at first, will work their way up to Joan of Arc-like cavalry troops.

You can learn different poems to try and woo ladies of different temperament, or not.  You can take part in tournaments, sure.  But what was cool was when I discovered the events in the tournaments varied by the region they take place in.  I own in the lance tournaments, but the viking mass sword battles always get me knocked out. 

You can pick up weapons and shields in battles.  I was so impressed, in my first desperate siege defense, when out of arrows, I picked a new quiverfull off an archer casualty nearby.  I've won tournaments by switching the two-handed sword given to me to the sword and shield combo of my first victim.

You can loot villages, steal cattle, raid caravans, or just be a friendly trader carrying salt and spices from one city to the next.

Picking Nits
Okay, enough gushing.  The only major thing I can think of to complain about is the Fantasy Alphabet names.  A company goes to all the trouble of modelling historically plausible weapons and armor and then the town and village name look like they just rolled some boggle dice and wrote the results down.  Come on!  Names should have a feel for the faction they belong to or the region they exist in.  The names in this game have none of that.  Shameful.

Beware of the difficulty settings, what they call "normal" is what anyone else would call difficult; your fresh recruits will beat you at sparring even though you have better stats, more hit points, and higher weapon skills.  Not recommended unless the default settings become too easy.

Also, a couple caveats.  This is all based on single player play, I don't know what the multiplayer game is like and couldn't care a whit.  I have a pretty good computer and have all the graphics options maxed.  It might look a little dated if you can't do that or are used to fancier new games.

The company is apparently working on a sequel  which I'm quite interested in seeing.

Praise for an old Flash Game

Caravaneer has been around for years.  I don't remember if I started playing this again recently and then thought to make the simple pack animals posts, or if it was making those posts that reminded me of this game I've played for hours in the past.  I think it is the most sophisticated flash game I've ever seen.  Even though it has simple graphics it offers a play experience that is reminiscent of Fallout 1 with less dialogue but more trading infrastructure.

In a nutshell, you're in a post-apocalyptic world and can take items from one little town to another for a profit if you can make it past the ubiquitous bandits.  In the early game you'll be limited to livestock as transport.  There is a pretty good selection with camels, donkeys, mules, horses or oxen and various carts to be pulled by the non-camels.

All these creatures require different amounts of food and water as well as travel at different speeds.  So you have to decide whether you want to travel more efficiently but slowly and have to fight all the bandits, or less efficiently and fast enough to outrun some of them.

Travel is abstract on a overland map that zooms in to a top-down battlefield.  Each character has a certain number of Action Points to expend each round and different actions, like firing weapons or reloading, take different amount of APs.

I'm a sucker for the dromedarys and their supper low food and water requirements.  So, I'll usually have a long train of them and then have to fight every step of the way to get from one town to another.  One good thing about this is that you can train up the number of APs and the gun accuracy of your people in these low risk fights for when you need them later in the game.

The game, like D&D, changes as you progress.  As you trade with towns it allows them to progress and grow out of the need for the very product you were trading and it becomes necessary to reach farther, to newer towns, to make money.  Eventually you'll need to upgrade your weapons and hire more caravan guards to even survive.  And then you'll probably want to upgrade to vehicles-- atvs, jeeps, hummers-- to outrun the deadliest bandits.

The game gets a little grindy (this is partially because of the slow travel I tend to use) and I think could do with less frequent bandit attacks.  It also feels like it rushes a bit to push you from one stage of the game to the next; you barely make 2 trips on your first trade route and the towns don't need those supplies any more.  A big flaw is that bandit partys drop all their gear.  It's cool to be able to sell some stuff when you defeat robbers, but It undermined the excitement of upgrading when bandits were dropping stacks of guns better than I'd seen in any shop yet.  I think all the detail spent on handguns is wasted because their window of usefulness is so small.

The game, though, is a perfect example of a computer being used by a game to do what it does best.  Water requirements, food usage, trading prices, all the number crunching is taken care of by the old mechanical brain.

Caravaneer was made by Dmitry Zheltobriukhov and is available from Sugar-Free Games as ad-ware.  I hear it is possible to find an ad-free swf file to downland. I could go on, but you should try the game out on your own.  And, Dmitry, if you see this, I'd buy a PC game like this, if you made one, maybe with the addition of setting up your own shops in towns so I could sell all the dang glass bottles robbers drop.

Alpha Omega

This past weekend was a gaming extravaganza.  I had my group's session on Friday night, got to play an indie story game for the first time Saturday, and made up a character and played in a new campaign of Alpha Omega on Sunday night.

I didn't really want to play Sunday.  But the DM is one of the best players in my game-- smart, nice, funny, and the only person I've met that can spontaneously create silly rhyming lyrics as well as me. So I felt socially obligated to give it a try.  He told me more than once that the game was "complicated, but in a good way, it actually gives you more freedom."  I was sceptical to say the least.

I was warned that character creation might take about an hour.  And when I finally sat down with another friend I ran into the first big problem.

The Tekumel Problem
Tekumel is cool, I know people still play it but good luck trying to describe it to a new, non-gamer player.  I think Mr. Maliszewski talked about a game recently being dependent on knowledge of D&D.  Tekumel is like that for me-- you have to understand the concept of classes and races and stats and fantasy avatars before they get complicated by this new game.  Anyway, I think this has all been said before by people, but Alpha Omega was a fresh experience of it for me.

So, what kind of player will I make (because it's new school you have to choose, you can't just let the dice tell you).  I always like wizards but this is a post-apocalyptic world.  I ask my friend:
"Is there magic?"
He says "yeah, sort of. Its called wielding."
I say "Oh.  Is it like psionics?'
"Sort of."
"More like superpowers?"
"Well . . ."

Hmm, so there are a ton of races.  Remnants are humans that have been mutated by raditation, but there is another race whose DNA has been modified intentionally. Something called Mesh?  See this game can't use the same old rpg tropes, everything has a cool name.  There is no internet in the future but the Swarm, no cities, but Arcologies.  I think the apocalypse was caused by meteors striking the earth, but there are these huge angel creatures and it isn't clear whether they are angels, or aliens of some sort.

Get the picture so far?  It is like gamers jaded with existing rpgs mash together every genre they can, to try to still get a thrill.  You've got some fantasy, science fiction, superhero, cryptopunk, and post-apocalypse all swirled into a soup of archetypes.  What character am I supposed to make when I don't even understand the world?

I decided I'd be a robot librarian.  The AIs seemed to have pretty good stats and I could take whole fields of skills, not knowing what might be useful. (note, this is actually a silly approach for a skill-based game.  If you want to be effective, be a combat character and chose only skills that directly effect combat.  Trust me, the system will make them matter no matter how much roleplaying the DM will want to do). 

I took the unsophisticated drawback so that I could actually roleplay my ignorance of the world.  Although, it is a little odd that a librarian would be so clueless.  I decided I was a reference librarian that has spent a lot of time in a little room studying the past.  Also, I look like IG-88.  I was a little shocked when I realized no one present knew who IG-88 was!  Anyway, SEO 1337 was born.

4e is so Simple
Look, this part may come off as condescending, but I was doing my best to design my own rpgs when I was a teen.  I had derived stats, and lots of crunch to movement rates, and lots of crunch to how stats mapped to real world abilities.  I don't care about any of that now.  For a reason. You may not agree that it actually gets in the way of play, but you would certainly have to concede it isn't necessary for play if you just sit and watch a session of my current homebrew game and how things work smoothly.

I could go on and on here but in a nutshell in Alpha Omega I found something that made 4e look elegant.  Let me put it this way: six seconds of a combat took 20 real world minutes.

I still had some fun roleplaying my curious robot, but that was outside of combat.  And I always got the sense that at least one of the players there was bored with all that, head down in the huge rule book studying up, waiting for the next combat.

Actually he was the only one present who had a good grasp of the rules (including the DM).  It was interesting to see what joy he had trying to micro-optimize his character for play.  He was most effective at everything: he killed 8 foes in combat while I was studying a turret in our vehicle-- trying to figure it out with the help of the Swarm (I hadn't taken the vehicle weapon systems skill).  When the only wielding character first tried to use his power, Mr. Optimizer had great joy in making a discussion about which wielding power was actually the best and which you shouldn't take because they were weak sauce.

I don't want to begrudge him his joy, I understand that kind of pleasure myself.  I still do some of that min-maxing with computer games.  But, it seems so one-faceted.  If we wanted to "win" the game we would have all made merc characters specialized in melee combat like Mr. Optimizer. But the rest of us had some good laughs at how clueless my robot was, and why our party of mercs included a librarian, mechanic, and rogue surgeon to the detriment of the whole endeavor.

The World is embodied in the Rules
So, to get back to the idea of more rules meaning more freedom. I think the DM meant that here you knew what you could do because it was spelled out for you, while in my game it wasn't.  I could certainly help my players better with this.  And if you've been following my posts you know I'm actually frantically trying to construct the world just in time for the players to interact with it.

But, this idea that rules would help embody the world turned out to be flawed.  The world is infinite.  You will never have enough rules or rulebook space for everything.  We spent 5 minutes of game time trying to figure out which skill the mechanic would have to roll against to try and fix his armor.  And there was no listing of the canisters for his micro-welding torch.  That caused some great consternation: "How much did they cost?  How much did they weigh?"  Mr. Optimizer wondered if they were included in the errata for the game.

So, In the end I'm just surprised that this kind of game, like I was toying with 30 years ago, is still around, still bought, and still capturing the hearts and minds of gamers.  I guess it amounts to people thinking they want something and thinking they are getting it.  What would happen if I stood up next session and said "Look we just spent an hour on a minor combat.  Is that what you want?  Really?  Because I got bored and started surfing the web on my phone."
__________
Have a couple mini-tomb entrances as my coin for joesky:

Fiasco

I got the chance to play via Skype with ze Bulette and Risus Monkey last night.  The post title is not describing the results, but the game we played.  I want to thank them both for the opportunity, especially Risus who had three hours more sleepiness being on that other coast.

First, I'm not a fan of Skype gaming.  The picture I get is grainy, and choppy, we haven't managed to conference call with it so you can't see everyone at the same time (it seems this should be a basic technology by now, come on imaginary invisible hand ;), and, any communication technology that garbles crucial sentences isn't very good at its job.

Anyway, that aside it was fun.  Fiasco is a one-shot story game where you replicate the plans-gone-wrong genre typified by movies like Fargo and Burn After Reading.  Random rolls determining relationships and objects connecting players help everyone develop characters and start solidifying a sense of story.

Starting out, it seems you need to leave a little slack to allow for things to develop, as well as allow other players room to be creative.  When it's your turn there are scenes that you can choose to either set up or resolve.  This is crucial because if you get stuck you can throw the responsibility of what happens next back at the other players and then just resolve whatever they set up.

Scenes will either go well for the player whose scene it is or not.  Accumulation of these successes and failures will help determine the outcome of the story, although the tendency is for everyone to be screwed.

We played a short form of the game.  At its best I think the funny flashes of creativity were the same as those when something unexpected comes together in a D&D game.  For example, when presented with a way to a) affect things in the past and b) clay that could become anything, one of my players made a tentacle for the one-armed fighter in our party.  I could have never predicted that, it was cool, creepy and funny.  Actually, a better example would be when two players riff off of each other.  If, for example the one-armed fighter had suggested a replacement and the other player said: "No, I know, a tentacle!"  Fiasco feels like it has bottled that flash of collaborative insight.

It achieves this with simple, clever rules.  Although, I get the sense if the rules were a DIY product and not something meant for polished publication it could probably be represented on one 8x11 page.

I think the intention is for all the scenes to be role-played.  I haven't played any other story games, but I think Fiasco can get away with this because it doesn't take itself seriously. I imagine a serious game would be some combination of terrifying to try to perform in and tiresome in its pretentiousness.

I suppose its greatest strength is that it zeroed in on the perfect genre for that kind of ironic, light hearted play- the fiasco movie.  Although, it does offer "playsets" which allow you to set your story in other genres such as postapocalyptic and fantasy (which we used).  This seemed odd to me.  Not that you couldn't make a fantasy movie as a caper-gone-wrong.  Or a post-apocalyptic movie about irony.  But when the "Fallout" playset lists The Road as a possible source of inspiration I'm thinking the maker of that playset is losing sight of what makes Fiasco Fiasco.

In conclusion, I wouldn't mind playing again.  It does distill out one of those things that makes roleplaying games awesome, and awesome in a way that is different than other games.  But I think that is just one of several aspects that made D&D awesomely unique.  Fiasco would not satisfy my exploration itch, or my making progress itch which adventure games do so well (I wonder if other story games are designed more to do those things).

And that is a lot of blather from someone who has played one shortened game of this and perused the rules.  Feel free to correct me on anything. 

Fable 2 - Choo Choo

I'm back from the land of house-sitters. I played Fable 2 until the batteries in the controller went dead. Due to my unfulfilled desire to experience the D&D endgame :) , I spent far more time earning money than following the story and ended up owning every property available (yes, I'm the landlord of three damn cities!) and half a million in gold pieces. Fun, huh? . . . umm . . . no.

When you can't play D&D because the groups you're in drift apart, or you can't find anyone that knows something besides WoW as fantasy gaming, you don't have many options. I have a long, conflicted history with fantasy computer games (yes CRPGs, but come on, there's no roleplaying involved).

Some games do a better job of satisfying the various things I seem to want from gaming than others. I have fond memories from Baldur's Gate 2 of having a powerful mage hunting liches hidden throughout the city. Hear that developers? Not only do I not remember the main plot of the story, but I remember thinking of it as a hindrance and wishing I could do more of what I wanted-- that most dangerous game, lich hunting.

Morrowind probably came closest to scratching all my itches. I didn't get a chance to play it much because of real world happenings, but I remember the joy of creating my own levitation spell and floating lazily above Where I Was Not Supposed to Go, monsters that would have easily killed me, drifting past beneath me.

Are you seeing a trend? I want to make choices. I don't want to be an actor in your finely crafted story, I want to make my own story. So, now I get Fable 2 which:
Spoilers below





Strips you of everything you have; shaves your head; forces you to make "moral" choices where the good choices don't affect the plot but lose you experience points; puts you in the most difficult battle up to that point-- without your gear-- so you'll most likely be scarred (permanent in the game); and then releases you back into the "sandbox" ten years later!

I know there are difficulties with designing a fantasy computer game and that the only real solution is to have a human brain looking back at me saying "what do you want to do now?" But really? After how many years of computer gaming and still this is state of the art: you follow along in a story where your actions make little difference to the overall outcome of anything? Do people like these games? Or are they like me, playing them because they are all that's offered?

I know it's a complicated problem involving hardware constraints, developer investment, and even player expectations, but it seems so evident to me: if you give players choices, story will rise up like a flame; if you force story on players, choice ceases to exist.

This turned into more of a rant than I intended, and I realize others have probably said all of this before and better. It's just I've been out of the gaming loop for a long time and was surprised to find a game released in October to still be pulling this stuff. It also seems applicable to this blog, because choice and railroad-free gaming is why I like the old school philosophy.

It seems especially applicable right now, because I am currently planning for a first gaming session for three people with no roleplaying experience whatsoever. I'd originally intended to have a patron give them gear, give them a quest, and get them going in a dungeon. I didn't want these players' first experience with roleplaying to be, "Okay what do you do?" I wanted to give them training wheels, so to speak. Get them down in the dungeon and experiencing the thrill of exploration and hard choices. But now, after having such a strongly negative reaction to the railroading of Fable 2, I'm going back to the drawing board. I'll probably still give them a patron and gear, but I want there to be real choices involved from the start, even in this first introductory adventure. It may be difficult to give them choice without them being confused, but I think it's important and I'm glad I'm thinking about it.

So, thanks Fable 2 . . . I guess.