T w e n t y S i d e d
This is amusing. Bring a towel.
Surrender, Monkeys!
I was reading Mark’s first impressions on GalCiv II and he had this to say:
… I just went back to my saved game and was able to mop up the rest of the Drengin empire without a problem (except that once I really had their backs to the wall, the surrendered their one remaining planet to another alien race, dammit!) …
I hate this. It is an ongoing problem in turn-based games. Civilizations had it. Alpha Centauri had it. The original CalCiv had it. What is this “Surrender to someone else” stuff? It’s nonsense!
 |
Imagine near the end of the European campaign in World War II: Our troops reach the outskirts of Berlin, and Germany realizes they can’t stop us. So they surrender to Brazil. We are forced to go home, because we can no longer take Berlin, which is now part of Brazil. More recently: We are about to take Baghdad, and Saddam surrenders to France. The parts of Iraq which we do not control are instantly and seamlessly transformed into French territory, and to continue our press into Baghdad would be an act of war against France.
This is just lame. I understand the gameplay concern here: This surrendering is done to keep the game even. The AI usually surrenders to the second-strongest player in the game, which keeps one race from leaping ahead of the others and ending the game before it’s really started. But this is just nonsense. In war, if you surrender, you surrender to the person attacking you, not to some unrelated third-party on the other side of the map. Even if Germany did try such a maneuver, and even if Brazil was willing to accept a besieged territory beyond their reach, it is insane to expect the invaders to respect or even recognize such an arrangement. Yet in the game, you must. If you attempt to continue the conquest, you will be obliged to declare war against the third party.
How much more absurd is it to extend this to a war between alien races, where the parties involved are going to be even more different than Iraqis and Frenchmen? More different than Brazil and Germany? When the two parties not only have different value systems, culture, and languages, but who also from entirely different spieces? When they very probably hate each other?
Here you are, at the victorious end of a hard-fought conquest, and the prize at the end (usually the homeworld of your foe, which is quite valuable) is simply handed to a rival. You have to just give up and go home at this point, or accept that you must now begin a whole new war. Perhaps you do accept war and elect to take those last worlds. The new owners will be bitter about losing this planet that was in their hands for one turn. They will fight long and hard, and harbor a lasting grudge over losing it. Sooner or later they will (hopefully) start to lose this war, and you will begin to eat into their territory. You can claim world after world, but in the back of your mind you know that once you corner them they will just give their remaining worlds to yet another third party, who will stupidly accept, and on it goes.
I just don’t understand the push to design brilliant and varied AI when metaphor-destroying stuff like this is still part of the game.
(The title of this post is in honor of the Drengin, who do indeed look like monkeys:)
Galactic Civilizations II
 |
The proliferation of RTS games has led us to the point where the term “strategy game” is usually used to mean a tenth-generation variant of the classic Warcraft recipe of unit management and resource gathering. If you’re like me and you’ve had your fill of that type of game since – oh, I don’t know – 1999-ish, then the world of strategy gaming is pretty small. What few titles you can find, very few of them are turn-based. It follows that turn-based space strategy games are even more rare. We’re talking about a part of a subgroup of a segment of a sub-genre here. A type of game that has probably seen less than a dozen titles in the last decade. Strike that. Less than a dozen titles ever.
The last game of this type that I tried was Master of Orion 3, (sadly nicknamed “MOO 3”, which is an awful nickname for a game of strategy and conquest) which was a miserable failure in every way that can be measured. Critics were cool, but after I played the game myself I concluded that they were being unduly generous. The only other explanation for the fact that the game wasn’t universally panned was that perhaps the critics found the elusive “stop sucking so bad” option buried somewhere in MOO 3’s vast expanse of inscrutable menus. This was a tragic end for a game that people had been anticipating for something like half a decade. MOO 2 is, as far as I’m concerned, the absolute pinnacle of space conquest games. To date, nobody has released anything that comes close.
But now CalCiv II is coming out, and I have hopes that it can re-capture that highly addictive gameplay that MOO 2 offered. Mark has his hands on it, and shares his first game experience.
I’ll be picking up the game in the next week or so, once I get some of these side projects cleared out. I fully expect the game will consume the time I usually spend on stuff like terrain engines and so I need to put things in order before I embark on something like this.
Hopes are high.
Please don’t suck.
Googled
A while back I talked about how, even when google selects the “wrong” result, you can still usually find what you’re looking for when you get there. Here is a pretty ironic counter-example:
The top result for “Twenty Sided” is this site. Still, if the searcher has the wit to add “dice” to their query, they should be taken to where they want to go. Which is probably not here. :)
cAPS lOCK kEY
Steven Den Beste (who, really, really needs to get some permalinks, seriously man) makes the following gentle suggestion:
i HATE THE CAPS LOCK KEY. iN THE 35 YEARS i’VE BEEN USING COMPUTERS i HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY NEEDED THE cAPS lOCK kEY A SINGLE TIME, BUT IT’S BEEN CAUSING ME GRIEF EVER SINCE WHEN i HAVE HIT IT ACCIDENTALLY. tHERE HAS TO BE A WAY TO DISABLE THAT [annoying item]!
While it is true that the CAPS LOCK is certainly an optional key, I do find uses for it. For example, when writing code, it is an almost universal convention to give constants names in all uppercase, as in:
|
|
So, if you have to type a lot of these at once (which is rare, usually lines of code like this are added as needed) then it might make sense in some cases to use the caps lock. Let’s face it, typing ROCKET_MAX_RANGE while holding down a shift key is akward. (try it!) So, there are certain rare exceptions where I do put this key to use. I suggest that this happens no more than once a year. If my keyboard did not have this key, it would have no impact on my productivity, except perhaps a small improvement gained from avoiding iNVERSED cAPS tYPING that SDB demonstrates above, and which, I assure you, happens a lot more often than once a year.
But no, by far the most useless key on the keyboard is of course:
This one.
I have never pushed it on purpose. I have pushed it by accident many, many times, and such mishaps usually end in confusion or disaster. It opens the start menu, and if you don’t stop typing you will end up launching a random application. So here we have the most annoying and useless key on the keyboard, tucked between two of the most commonly used and indispensible. Press this one when you’re playing a game, and the OS thoughtfully yanks you out of it (often leading to a crash) to present this menu to you. The left ALT and CTRL are two important buttons for most gamers. They get used for stuff like jumping and ducking. So, gamers get the thrill of hammering away on these two buttons, knowing that a misplaced finger in a moment of panic will bring the whole show crashing down.
What amazes me is this: Ever try to buy a keyboard without a windows key? They are rare and expensive. There are high end “gaming” keyboards (a friend showed me one last night) that allow you to disable the key, but nobody has the nerve to just leave the stupid, useless, annoying little bugger off the keyboard entirely. The fact that the key needs to be disabled should be a dead giveaway that it shouldn’t be there in the first place. I keep waiting for Winkey-free keyboards to catch on, but year after year we see the same stupid keyboard.
I’m telling you: For a clever person out there someplace, there is a fortune to be made on this problem. Make a (cheap!!) keyboard without the Windows key, without that also-useless “clipboard” key, without the CAPs lOCK, and of course without the shopping keys and “internet” buttons that appear on some big-name branded keyboards. Make a trimmed-down version of the standard keyboard, and geeks will buy them faster than you can make them.
SpiderMug
Some mornings pose an extra challenge. Every once in a while, I have one of those mornings where I feel like I’m just not up to the task of being awake and walking upright. The day is too daunting. At those exceptional times, I have to call on the help of…
…my Spider-Man mug. I fill spidey here with a heaping helping of thick black coffee and stare into space, in much the same way Spidey might stare at New York after getting beaten up by Rihno and then reading another vitriolic Op-Ed in the Daily Bugle calling for his capture and arrest. Sort of a, “This sucks. So remind me again why I’m doing it?”
I like the Spider-Proverb, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I like this because it leads naturally to Shamus’ corollary, “If you’re powerless then you probably don’t have much in the way of responsibilities.” So, I sit at my computer slack-jawed while taking comfort in the fact that for the next hour or so nobody is going to expect much out of me.
Spider-Man and me, we’re like kindred spirits.
Deploy Airbag
I’m upgrading WordPress, the blog software that makes this site do its thing. The site may get scrambled, vanish, explode, or otherwise fail to do what you want until I get the new version running again.
LATER: All done. Looks like it worked. Cool.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled… um… whatever it is we do here.
From The Archives:
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?