My existence on this earth has been a hard one so far. I have been put here with the sole purpose of playing every single game about terraforming ever made, and while some of them haven’t been too bad none of them have tackled the core concept of transforming a planet from barren wasteland to lush paradise well at all. Surviving Mars was way more interested in being a mediocre city builder than it was any terraforming elements. Terraforming Mars is a literal board game adaptation, and necessarily limited by that fact – your terraforming activity is limited to placing a very limited number of ocean and forest tiles onto a map. Per Aspera is… not good, would be the very short version, and the longer one is a 6,000 word angry rant. Last year’s Terraformers is probably the best attempt I’ve played so far, fusing a terraforming game with a simple 4X that still allowed it some satisfying mechanical depth, but the games tended to finish early before you completed the terraformation process and so it still felt like there was something missing. Which sums up my experience with these games in general, really; I play them all in the hope that they’ll scratch the itch, but they all end up disappointing me in one way or another.

I mention this all so that I can put the next sentence in its proper context: Planet Crafter is not disappointing. Planet Crafter is the first game about terraforming that I’ve played that’s actually sold me on the fantasy that I’m terraforming.a planet. And, weirdly, it’s done it by being much more mechanically light on the terraforming than even Terraforming Mars – instead, the bulk of its effort is spent on showing the player how the environment changes around them as their Terraforming rating improves. And this is an approach that pays off in spades.

Planet Crafter is very different from the games I just listed. All of those games are strategy games, based on the logical reasoning that if you’re tackling a problem on the scale of terraforming an entire planet you need a global outlook. But maybe that’s where they all went wrong; it makes the terraforming process too mechanical, too impersonal, too about watching a series of numbers go up. Meanwhile Planet Crafter is a game that is literally all about watching a number go up, but you do it from ground level — Planet Crafter is not a strategy game, but is instead a survival game that takes some very heavy inspiration from Subnautica.

Planet Crafter starts with you being dropped onto a Mars-like planet with a small chest of supplies and given the goal of getting the planet’s Terraforming rating from its starting value of zero all the way up to the “complete biosphere” score of five trillion. You have the standard selection of slowly-decreasing survival meters — food, water, oxygen — that need topping up as you work, and there are mineral resources scattered all over the ground that you can use to build structures and machines. So you start, as is normal with these games, by building a living compartment and storage area next to your landing site. Around the outside you scatter some windmills for power, and small drills that liberate gas from the planet’s crust, raising the atmospheric pressure. Each drill makes a pathetic contribution to the Terraforming rating, increasing it by a fraction of a point per second, but they’re still useful because your overall Terraforming rating is split into the standard categories you’d expect in a game like this: Pressure, Heat and Oxygen, and later on there’s a separate Biomass counter that also contributes that’s split into Plants, Insects and Animals. The drills may be doing almost nothing to the big terraforming number, but they’re making more substantial progress for you along the Pressure track, and progression in each category unlocks more and better terraforming tech.

So, having the drills running for a bit gets you solar panel tech, which produces about four times as much power as a windmill. They also unlock a bigger oxygen tank, allowing you to venture further in your exploration of the world. There’s some cool stuff in the Heat category, so you build a couple of heaters (bizarrely, these go inside your buildings rather than outside) and this gets you a better variant of the vegetube – these are machines that you can put plant seeds inside, and then they’ll produce Oxygen. All of the new unlocks are between four and ten times more effective at terraforming than their more primitive variants, but they demand more advanced materials; pretty soon you’re wanting to build tier 2 heaters that require Iridium, but there’s no Iridium in the starting area. So you embark on an expedition to find some; mine was to the crashed spaceship wreck I could see nearby, one of several scattered around the world which are full of all sorts of advanced materials that you do eventually get the ability to produce yourself, but which are scarce and limited until you do — including Iridum. If you do go in that direction you’ll also likely find a cave entrance blocked by a huge ice wall that melts once the overall planet temperature gets to 100 nanoKelvin¹ – why, that’s another reason to try and increase the Heat level!

The first hour or two of the game is like this: scrounging up materials, building terraforming machinery so that you can unlock new and better terraforming machinery, and then trying to find out where to get the materials to build the new stuff. The steady trickle of new items you unlock, and the challenge of figuring out how to build them, will keep your brain occupied to the point where you might even forget about the overall Terraforming rating — but this is important too, as not only does it have its own very long line of unlocks, it also governs how the planet changes over time. The target value of 5,000,000,000,000 represents a completely terraformed world, but you’re given a slightly more modest goal to hit when you first land on the planet: 175,000. This is the point where you progress from the initial terraforming stage, Barren, to the second one, Blue Skies. Perhaps not that immediately arresting, I’ll grant you; they’re nice to look at, but it’s ultimately just the skybox being gradually switched out, and it’s this kind of weak terraforming representation of painting the planet a different colour that turned me off of all of those other games. But in Planet Crafter Blue Skies is just stage two of fifteen. The third stage is Clouds, and the fourth, Rain, is where I really started to like Planet Crafter.

You see, the Rain stage is the first time Planet Crafter shows you that it’s not just switching textures around, and that it’s actually pretty serious about this whole terraforming thing. Every other game I’ve seen that’s done terraforming has done it in a pretty coarse fashion; Per Aspera is an extreme example, where a full third of the planet turned into an ocean overnight, but the others aren’t much better. In Planet Crafter, though, once I’d been in the Rain stage for a bit, I started to notice small pools of water appearing on the ground. After a bit more, I noticed a much bigger pool of water accumulating next to the landing site – and it didn’t stop. Fortunately I’d already relocated my main base to somewhere more central and higher-altitude (one nice thing about Subnautica is that it was pretty easy to plop down a basic outpost for storage and oxygen, and Planet Crafter inherits that); I could have moved the tier 1 drills and windmills but it honestly wouldn’t have been worth the effort as they were fully obsolete, and so they were left to be swallowed up by what eventually became a massive lake. I am sure that the initial landing site being on the bottom of a lake bed is 100% intentional on the part of the developers because it’s a brilliant demonstration of how the world changes in response to your terraforming efforts — gradually rather than immediately, but significantly.

It certainly worked on me. From this point onwards I was hooked, and hooked in a way that games don’t often manage these days.

Planet Crafter’s map changing as the Terraforming rating increases is its biggest strength and most impressive achievement. Watching the planet blossom around you is tremendously rewarding, but it also has significant mechanical implications as new routes are opened up by melting ice and growing vines, and new resources are brought to the surface by plant roots. Sneakily this change works both ways, since the rising water level and (eventually) foliage spread will also conceal caves and wrecks that are otherwise quite easy to find when the planet is still in its Barren state. You won’t miss anything critical, but it’s still a good idea to get some of your exploring done early. The change is gradual in most places — you can even watch the enormous ice walls melt in real-time if you’re willing to wait for about half an hour — and there’s overlap between the different terraforming stages that makes it feel a bit more organic, so fish don’t magically appear in your lakes once you hit the Fish stage; you’ll see increasing numbers of them swimming around in the preceding Breathable Atmosphere stage if you’re in a lake that’s deep enough. There’s a few rough edges, such as exploring areas towards the edge of the map that look like they’re unfinished – but in reality they just haven’t had terraforming effects applied to them yet, and the un-terraformed version hasn’t had much time spent on it because most people wouldn’t make it out there that early. In general, though, it’s a smashing success, and the amount of change – and the variety of it – was always surprising, all the way up until a couple of hours before the end of the game.

In terms of how you as a player change the way you play in response to the changing environment, Planet Crafter also succeeds, albeit in a more qualified manner. A key element of survival games is mastery of the environment; at the start you’re scrabbling for food and water and put in a significant amount of time obtaining both, but ideally by the midgame you’ve built machines that automate that away and have moved on to more interesting problems. For example, Subnautica gave you a knife that automatically cooked fish and a water filter machine that automatically produced filtered water. But because it’s a terraforming game, Planet Crafter has an additional challenge/opportunity, in that as you change the world to make it more suitable for human life this should make obtaining basic survival resources easier. (Per Aspera screwed this up badly, eventually covering half of Mars in an ocean but still forcing you to get drinking water for your colonists by mining out aquifers.)

Let’s take water as the first example. At the beginning of the game you’re picking up chunks of frozen ice from the ground and taking them to a crafting station to melt into water. Pretty simple, but still annoying. After five or six hours of this, you’ll unlock a machine that condenses water automatically from the brand new atmosphere you’ve created, and shortly after this happens you’ll be forced into using it because you’ll reach the Liquid Water terraforming stage and all of the ice that was previously just lying around on the ground will have melted – its terraforming science might be nonsense, but Planet Crafter is at least grounded in basic logic. But wait, if there’s now a big lake where the initial landing site used to be, can’t you just go and drink from that? Well, yes you can. Eventually. You need to equip a water filter item that doesn’t unlock until about halfway in, but once you have it you can just slurp water directly from the surface of any pool you find. It’s still a good idea to have a couple of water bottles in your inventory just in case, but it’s much less of a headache to keep yourself topped up.

Oxygen is a similar story. You make oxygen refill canisters from cobalt, and your buildings automatically replenish your oxygen with no requirement to even power them. As the game progresses you make successively larger oxygen tanks that extend the amount of time you can spend outside before refilling – this is nothing that Subnautica didn’t already do, though. However, just after you unlock the water filter you also unlock an air filter item; this reduces the rate of your oxygen consumption by filtering it from the atmosphere, and the reduction is increased as you improve the terraforming level. Eventually you reach the Breathable Atmosphere stage (which is stage 11 of 15, so quite late in the game) and you don’t need oxygen any more except when you’re swimming underwater.

Food is the sole sore point where the basic survival mechanics are concerned. You initially survive on “Space Food” meals that you land with and that you can subsequently find in chests scattered across the surface of the planet. You’ll also find plant seeds, and one of the first things that you unlock is a Food Grower machine – put some eggplant seeds in this, and ten minutes later you’ll have an eggplant. There’s no need to restock the seeds and it’ll keep producing eggplants indefinitely, so this is admirably low-friction – the problem is, this doesn’t get replaced by anything. At the end of the game I was still having to periodically grab food from my food growers to keep my food levels topped up, just as I was at the start; there’s a V2 of the food grower that grows it more quickly, and an outdoor farm that grows more of it, but neither of these are significant upgrades over the basic food grower, and so this is the one survival activity that does not change no matter how much you’ve terraformed the planet.

Planet Crafter’s gameplay evolves in other ways, but these aren’t related to the terraforming level at all and could be found in any other survival game. There’s no hostile life in the game – and in fact very few ways you can die outside of letting your survival meters run out — so the major overhead that you have, aside from keeping your food/water/oxygen topped up, is travel time. There are no vehicles in the game and so you have to go everywhere on foot; you gradually unlock modules that make you run faster, and one of the earlier unlocks is a jetpack which has basically zero vertical movement capability, but which will give you a significant horizontal speed boost, as well as letting you scoot up steep surfaces you’d otherwise be unable to climb and fly over lakes instead of having to swim across them. Even with these maxed out, though, bringing back rarer resources from far-flung areas is a bit of a pain; my exploration sessions were always punctuated with building supply caches so that I could dump the less valuable/less used items for later, but I’d always have to head for home whenever I was full up on Super Alloy. The oxygen and water upgrades you get at least make this easier, as in the early-midgame you’re also having to make sure you have enough oxygen and water for the trip, and it’s not a massive overhead as with decent mobility upgrades and a good knowledge of the map and the shortcuts opened up by your terraforming it takes no more than 5 minutes to get from the centre of the map to any of its edges. Still, it’s not until the lategame that this pain goes away, as you unlock two very useful things:

• A teleporter. Gated by a rare material that you can only find in one very specific cave, so you won’t be able to build more than 2-3 until you can manufacture it yourself, but I found that that was enough.

• Logistics drones.

The logistics drones are super useful when combined with autocrafters as they eliminate the other major painpoint in this kind of game: having to run around your various storage lockers to find the materials for a specific crafting recipe, going back to the crafting station, realising you’ve forgotten one, going back to the storage lockers… this isn’t a huge problem until you start crafting later buildings that require several tiers of crafted item, and even then you can find enough of those materials in the environment from wrecks etc. that you can get a few examples up and running before having to resort to making them yourself. Still, when you’re making the final push through the last few terraforming stages you will need to properly scale, and it’s at this point that having effectively unlimited stocks of materials that are brought to you by the drones is absolutely invaluable. It’s a simple system, too; set your ore extractor in a remote location to supply Uranium and a storage locker back at your base to demand Uranium, and the drones will take care of transporting Uranium between the two – just so long as you have enough drones, as they can only carry one item at a time.

The only catch is that the drones aren’t truly useful until you have the maximum tier of ore extractor unlocked (which lets you select which sort of material you want to mine instead of having it mined randomly and filling up the extractor with unwanted junk – crucial for setting up a stable production chain), and this is sitting at the end of the Pressure unlock line, and to get there you’ll need the maximum level of drill, which is a long way up the Biomass unlock line. It’s nice that they made things interconnected like this, even though the connections don’t make a lot of sense; however, it also means that while you might unlock the ability to build drones about halfway through the game, you won’t be able to actually use them properly until about 3-4 hours before the end of the game. This is probably fine; I do wish it had been pitched a little earlier as I was thoroughly tired of having to carry things around myself by the time my Super Alloy and Pulsar Quartz production lines came online, but those broke nearly every single constraint on what I could build so it’s probably for the best.

So in terms of survival mechanics and production chains — the bread and butter of a survival game — it’s mostly good news. Planet Crafter makes a better fist of it than most of the examples I’ve played, and it ties the result of your terraforming into the survival mechanics decently well. Where it falls down, though, and falls down badly, is the terraforming mechanics themselves. Which I’ve already alluded to a couple of times, but it’s time to talk about it in detail: at the start of the game, to generate Pressure, I built tier 1 Drills. At the end of the game, to finish out the Pressure unlocks so that I could get my maximum level ore extractor, I built tier 5 Drills. The method did not change throughout the 25 hours that it took me to finish Planet Crafter; the drills just got bigger. It’s the same for Heat – in fact I thoroughly ignored Heat past the halfway point and built exactly one tier 4 heater, not even bothering with tier 5, and still got all of the unlocks thanks to passive Heat generation from my ore extractors. Oxygen generation is the only terraforming process that encounters a step change, and only because of how it gets combined with Biomass.

When you start the game you have access to just the three basic terraforming mechanisms: Heat, Pressure, and Oxygen. Once you get to the Liquid Water stage, though, you unlock Biomass generation, split into Plants, Insects and Animals. Insects and Animals are completely locked off until you get to their corresponding terraforming stages, so you’re mostly concerned with Plants here. Previously you’ve been generating Oxygen by sticking seeds into magic vegetubes which are somehow producing enough oxygen to oxygenate the entire planet; once you can grow plants the vegetubes are totally abandoned in favour of Algae Spreaders and Tree Spreaders, which generate both Plants and Oxygen at the same time. Algae Spreaders just work, but do not scale well; Tree Spreaders on the other hand produce an order of magnitude more Plants and Oxygen than Algae Spreaders at their first tier, and they have two more advanced tiers. So you build a couple of Algae Spreaders to get you across the Biomass gap separating vegetubes from Tree Spreaders (and also because algae is a key component of mutagens), and then you solely focus on Tree Spreaders. These need a tree seed that you need to fabricate inside a DNA Manipulator in order to function, but once they’re online they produce a ridiculous amount of Plants and Oxygen. Unlike the rest of the terraforming mechanisms, Tree Spreaders – along with most of the rest of the Biomass machines — visibly change the environment around them, with the tier 3 Tree Spreader eventually creating incredibly dense forests whose tree type depends on the type of seed you inserted to kickstart tree growth.

Now, I don’t want any misunderstandings here: I think this is good. I think this is very, very good; in fact it’s how I wish the rest of the terraforming mechanics in the game worked. The Insects machines, when you get them, work the same way; there’s a slightly convoluted process of creating bee and butterfly larvae, but once you have them you’ll see bees and butterflies everywhere, and if you add in a few Flower Spreaders you can make your base into a pastoral idyll. It’s a much more involved process compared to splatting down Drills and Heaters everywhere, and it’s got a good payoff: it’s extremely satisfying to see all of this life where a couple of dozen hours ago there was a barren wasteland.

Here’s the problem, though: the Terraforming rating doesn’t give a shit about how nice your planet looks. All it cares about is the number, and the Number Must Go Up. And the slightly mad decision Planet Crafter has made is to have all terraforming mechanisms contribute to the global Terraforming rating equally, with no regard given to how complex they are. There’s no weighting to say that actually having 1,000,000 tons of plant life is more valuable than a few more parts-per-million of oxygen in the atmosphere. And once you reduce it to a pure numbers game, you see that the numbers are wildly lopsided. Here are some examples:

• A tier 5 Drill produces 295 pK of heat per second and 3950 nPa of pressure per second. The units do not actually matter, only the numbers matter, so this drill is contributing a total of 4,245 per second to the Terraforming rating.

• A tier 2 Beehive produces 358 grams per second of Plants and 390 grams per second of Insects. It contributes 748 per second to the Terraforming rating.

• A butterfly farm with the absolute rarest type of butterfly in it (which provides a 1400% multiplier) will produce 1,050 grams of Insects per second, for 1,050 total terraforming per second².

So already this is wildly unbalanced away from Insects; in terms of contribution to the Terraforming rating the Drill is between 4-7 times better. But the reason I didn’t finish the game by spamming Drills is because of the existence of the tier 3 Tree Spreader, which with the most basic type of seed in it will still put out 10,625 oxygen and 1,562 plants per second, for a whopping 12,277 Terraforming rating per second – nearly 3 times as much as the max level Drill! And this is before adding other multipliers; better tree seeds add a multiplier to the output, stacking Machine Optimizers nearby with Oxygen-boosting fuses in them add another multiplier to the output (no such booster exists for Insects), and finally for all terraforming resources you can launch rockets into space to provide a stacking 10X global multiplier to that resource – and the Oxygen-boosting rockets are much cheaper and easier to build than the Insect-boosting rockets.

So there’s absolutely no reason to go into Insects — or by extension Animals, since this requires progression down the Insects line to unlock the Genetic Extractor. The optimal configuration for reaching 5 trillion terraforming points is eight Tier 3 Tree Spreaders with high-quality seeds clustered tightly around a collection of Machine Optimizers, and then spamming as many Oxygen rockets into space as possible. And it’s not like this isn’t still a lot of work to build, but I’m annoyed about it for two reasons. One is that it encourages degenerate play; I’m never really concerned with the appearance of my bases in survival games so I don’t bother with cosmetic furniture etc. and every spare scrap of wall space is occupied by a crafting station or a storage locker, but I would have expected variety or layout or surface coverage to matter somewhat in a game about terraforming. Here, though, every single mechanic is encouraging me to go all-in on the most effective thing, and I’m not even being incentivised to spread the Tree Spreaders out a bit; instead I have them all clustered in the same area for the Machine Optimizer bonus and the result is a ridiculous-looking super forest in the middle of an otherwise-empty field. The other is that, well, I could have just completely ignored Insects and Animals, which feel like fairly major aspects of the game. The only reason I even bothered with them was because I was curious about the mechanics, and I did have some time to kill while waiting for the overall Terraforming rating to tick up to its final goal. And it turns out they’re nice to look at! But that’s all they are.

And for a game whose major strength is managing to get you to suspend your disbelief as the world around you believably transforms over the course of about an in-game month, not encouraging the player to actively contribute to that transformation through smart building placement — and in fact encouraging the opposite — is a big failing. It’s by no means a critical one; I wouldn’t care about it anywhere near as much if I saw it in another game, but in Planet Crafter the change is the point, and so it’s a nagging irritant here where it wouldn’t be in something like Subnautica, especially when the rest of the terraforming process is so well-handled.

I guess the fact that this bugs me so much is partly a reflection of how smart Planet Crafter is almost everywhere else, though, like making sure the player can’t accidentally consume all of a limited resource and leave themselves unable to build key machines to progress by periodically delivering more materials via asteroid strike. I also very much appreciated the lack of peril from external sources (as fun as the Reaper Leviathans were in Subnautica, they wouldn’t be a good fit for Planet Crafter) and it was relaxing and stimulating to explore its ever-changing world in search of secrets while planning out my next goals. I think there’s quite a lot for the players who do enjoy the more cosmetic base-building aspects of survival games to engage with here, in spite of the game’s failings; you can craft a planet in this game, or at least a small chunk of one, even though you don’t particularly have to. For me, though, it was more than enough to see the process of terraforming finally done right in a game, and Planet Crafter pairs that hook with survival gameplay that’s never less than competent and, more often than not, extremely well thought-out.

The post Thoughts: Planet Crafter appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Solium Infernum! An all-time classic game of treachery, backstabbing and deceit, where up to six archfiends battle for control of the empty throne of Hell. The original 2009 version was designed and coded by a solo dev called Vic Davis and burned brightly in certain corners of the internet before fading away shortly afterwards; however, it clearly made an impression on somebody because this year has seen the release of one of the most inexplicable remakes in videogame history: an all-new version of Solium Infernum, with 3D visuals, overhauled game mechanics and a dedicated server for handling asynchronous multiplayer games.

(I say it’s inexplicable because a remake of a 14 year-old indie game which had a pretty niche playerbase even in 2009 doesn’t really have much of a chance of making its money back. I would love to have sat in on the greenlight meeting for that one.)

I wasn’t originally intending to buy the remake. I played Scrofula in the RPS game, so I have extensive prior experience of just how much brainspace Solium Infernum can take up as you plan and scheme and collude with and against the other players while trying to clamber to the top of a pile of skulls. I didn’t think I had that kind of time any more. But then my friends all decided to hurl themselves headfirst into the abyss, and I was curious about the remake, and so five of us ended up spending a three week period in March tearing strips out of one another. And the more I played it, the more I got into it, until I eventually decided to record the latter half of the game for posterity in another diary.

This diary will unfortunately suffer from the remake being limited in some crucial ways compared to the original: I didn’t start keeping detailed notes (or screenshots) until turn 25 (out of 50), and unlike the original game there’s no way of replaying a game — or even an individual turn — once it’s done, so I can’t go back and make them retrospectively. This means that the first half of the game recorded in Part 1 of the diary is a bit light on detail, which can’t be helped; however, it also means that everything past that point is a contemporaneous record of my thought process as I played through each turn, which becomes increasingly paranoid and unhinged as the game progresses.

I’ve split the diary into five parts, mostly because the full thing is over 17,000 words and it’s a bit much to expect people to read all of it in one go.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
  

Oh, and about the diary name: the remake gives each multiplayer game a quick identification code made up of three random words picked from an appropriately ominous-sounding dictionary. Ours was called “Apocalypse Begrudge Tempestuous”, which ended up feeling extremely apt.

The post Apocalypse Begrudge Tempestuous: A Solium Infernum Diary appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is Part 5 of a 5-part diary of a Solium Infernum multiplayer game. For Part 4, go here. For full context, see the contents post here.

Turn 45

Hey, guess what?

I’ve miscalculated.

It’s another almost perfect turn for me. Pandaemonium is taken, I am excommunicated, and the 5-turn victory timer starts. Pilfer Artifact on the Orb of Oblivion succeeds. Daemonic Interference on Zael succeeds. I’m even benefited by Skippy’s legion “resisting” his Infernal Juggernaut ritual again, although I feel less good about this because that was Skippy’s trump card and it looks a hell of a lot to me like he’s not getting to play it because of a bug.

But I failed to read the small print around excommunication. Being excommunicated takes you out of the normal ebb and flow of the game. Everyone can attack you with no restrictions, you can’t engage in diplomacy any more, and you can’t use the Bazaar. This I knew. What I didn’t know — or had forgotten — is that being excommunicated also stops you from being Regent, so I get skipped for start player and it goes straight to Zael.

(And the really funny part is, I made exactly the same miscalculation 14 years ago in the RPS Solium Infernum game. Nice to know that I haven’t changed much since then.)

This is all actually pretty sensible as it makes sneaky decapitation strikes much more difficult, which I think is a good thing, but it also means all of that planning around suicide bombing Skippy’s stronghold was a waste of time. Now the Hounds of Hell are extremely exposed, and Skippy can kill them quite easily with his starting legion if he chooses to move them first. I’ll try and get them out of there to a safe spot with my first action, but I’m not hopeful.

I also potentially have a problem with Peter. Zael is locked down with Daemonic Interference for at least another turn and can’t steal my stuff, but Peter’s taken the Wood of the Suicides which gives him +2 Deceit Strength. I don’t think this is the same as +2 Deceit Power, it just means that any Deceit rituals he tries on me are more likely to succeed. But he’s now at least as strong as Zael in terms of Deceit, and possibly even stronger. And I think Deceit rituals are my number one threat. Skippy can cause a lot of problems with Infernal Juggernaut if he can eventually get it to stick, but he can’t take my Stronghold unless somebody manages to steal the Black Monolith from me with Pilfer Artifact.

I can take the Wood away from him, right now. The Sons are in range. But that would mean moving them away from Pandaemonium and hoping that there’s nothing else around powerful enough to take it back in the next couple of turns

Skippy’s crap legion is lurking around there still and he could put Infernal Juggernaut + a Ranged-boosting stratagem on it and potentially win a combat in the Ranged phase – Pandaemonium currently only has 3HP after my assault and will regenerate it very slowly, so it’ll only take a few points of advantage for it to fall. But he can only use Infernal Juggernaut on one legion at a time, and he doesn’t know I’m going to move the Sons away, and if they stay where they are he can’t take it because Pandaemonium gets combat support from any adjacent legions.

(Probably, anyway. That legion has a Ranged stat of 0, which he could boost to 12 with Infernal Juggernaut and then give +8 with a Stratagem. Pandaemonium has 11 Ranged, and will get +7 as Combat Support from the Sons. That’s 20 vs 18, for 2 damage, and then his legion dies in the Melee phase.)

This is all leaving aside the potential complications of Destruction rituals. Skippy has 5 Destruction and could start throwing fireballs and stat maladies around that could upset these calculations. But I have 11 Destruction resist thanks to Evil Ward, so I think I’ll have to take the chance.

So. Move the Hounds to try and save them. Move the Sons to try and take the Wood before Peter can get any Deceit rituals off. And then Collect Tribute twice (I badly need money) and attach Praetors to Pandemonium and the Adamantine Guard.

(Another thing that feels like it’s not intended: when I stole the Adamantine Guard from Skippy, I also got the artifact he’d attached to them that means they provide their full stats as combat support to adjacent legions and strongholds. So any stat boost I give to them also goes to the other defenders. Skippy and Peter can still unpick this defence in a couple of turns if they work together, which is why I’m putting most of my faith in the Black Monolith. But I’m not going to neglect it either.)

One last piece of odd diplomatic activity: Zael has offered to vassal himself to Tom, of all people. Unsure what the play here is, and I’m starting to get the horrible feeling I might really have been tricked – I’m fairly sure that vassalisation makes all forms of victory except Power Behind The Throne impossible (this is a different relic that Zael doesn’t have), so Zael is giving up his Kingmaker victory. But he made the vassalisation offer before I took Pandaemonium. If I hadn’t attacked it at all he’d be screwed, so perhaps I wasn’t his Puppet after all.

Turn 46

Okay, the Hounds did die, but it was Peter moving a legion into their move path that did for them. Which is deeply annoying because if I’d picked a different route they’d still be alive.

Tom rejects the offer of vassalage from Zael, which is a bit mystifying. Somebody plays a Traditional Bribe event on me, which requires me to give up 25% of my tribute or… lose some prestige. Since I no longer have use for prestige, it does nothing.

A Pilfer Artifact on the Black Monolith is attempted by Peter, and fails. I’ve taken the Wood of the Suicides so the threat there is a bit lessened; if it works the same way as old Solium Infernum it’s something like a 1% chance of success even with maxed Deceit.

And it transpires that Daemonic Interference doesn’t work the way I thought it did; I thought that it’d  make an opposed check against Zael’s Prophecy resistance every turn in order to stay in play, but the reality is I only needed to pass that check once, which I did last turn. Now it stays up for as long as I’m willing to pay for it with no further obstacles, which means Zael can no longer cast any rituals and has effectively been removed from the game as far as I’m concerned since we don’t share a border. That is, frankly, ridiculous, just one of several baffling design decisions in this remake. I feel bad about it because I didn’t know it’d be this overpowered – but also I can’t exactly walk it back because it’s a key part of my plan.

I do have a problem with Skippy’s Infernal Juggernaut legion, though. He’s finally got the ritual to work, and it’s now even more powerful than the Sons. He can’t take my Stronghold (yet), and he can’t kill the Army of the Fallen in one round because they’re receiving full support from the Adamantine Guard. But he can kill the Adamantine Guard by moving around my Stronghold; it’s four hexes away but that legion has four movement thanks to Infernal Juggernaut.

So, I’m going to try and repurpose the Orb of Oblivion along with abusing the turn order a little bit. Skippy is Regent this turn, which means next turn he’ll go after me (I might not be able to be start player any more, but I still have a place in the turn order). My own starting legion is lurking around nearby. If I strap the Orb to it and move it into position next to the Adamantine Guard with my last move of the turn, then if Skippy does go for them I’ll be able to nuke them with my first move next turn.

He can just cast Infernal Juggernaut on another legion after this, of course, but I’m hoping this at least buys me some time.

Not sure what to do with the Sons. I could try and kill Peter’s legion next to the Wood of the Suicides, but if I were him I’d run away with his first move of the turn. A funnier, higher-risk option would be to move it up towards Peter’s stronghold, which it can take in 3 turns. But that would leave Pandaemonium unguarded, and if Tom goes for it, or Skippy decides to switch Infernal Juggernaut to his Hellspawn legion, it could still fall.

No, the plan has taken me this far and I won’t abandon it now. As long as I control the Wood of the Suicides it’s incredibly unlikely Peter can succeed in stealing the Black Monolith. That means the only way the other players can stop me is to retake Pandaemonium – all of the manoeuvring around my Stronghold is a distraction, albeit a valuable one as Skippy can’t reach Pandaemonium with his good legions except by walking past my Stronghold. So I’ll keep the Sons down there, and trust in my Deceit + Destruction resistance to stop anything particularly bad from happening.

Turn 47

My god, it’s like I can see the future.

Skippy moves his Infernal Juggernaut legion around and kills the Adamantine Guard, just as I predicted. My suicide bomb legion is in position next to them, and they’ll go boom next turn.

Both Skippy and Peter try Pilfer Artifact on the Black Monolith. Both of them fail. I expect they’ll be doing this every turn until they succeed, or I win. I really hope my calculation of the odds is correct and that rituals work the way I think they do (each player rolls 2d6 and adds their modifiers, highest score wins, defender wins draws), as even with 6 Deceit they’d only have a 15 in 1236 chance of stealing it.

One reason I’ve locked down Zael with Daemonic Interference is because his stronghold gives him +1 Deceit strength, making it a 35 in 1236 chance. Which sounds silly, now that I think about it. If Peter had 6 Deceit and the +2 bonus from the Wood of the Suicides, he’d have a 70 in 1236 chance. This was really all very unlikely – but if one of them levels Prophecy to 6 and hits me with a successful Daemonic Interference, I lose the +4 resist bonus from Expose Treason and Zael is suddenly freed to try it at a mere -2 disadvantage, giving him a… 330 in 1236 chance. That’s over 25%! Better hope they aren’t rushing Prophecy.

Peter attacks my other legion next to the stronghold, the Army of the Fallen. They don’t die immediately but they won’t survive a second attack, and I won’t be able to reinforce them in time.  My defences have collapsed faster than I anticipated and it’s clear to me that without the Black Monolith I’d already be dead; I don’t see how anyone really pulls off a successful Pandaemonium play without it.

He also attacks the Wood of the Suicides, which is currently receiving combat support from the Sons of Typhon. His attacking legion dies, messily. That frees the Sons to move back to support Pandaemonium.

The Bazaar is open again now, so they’re all potentially free to buy new things that’ll mess my plans up. But as long as I have the Black Monolith the stronghold is invincible, and I don’t think they can get anything strong to Pandaemonium in time to take it.

Just three more turns.

Turn 48

Oh fuck.

My blood runs cold when I see somebody has played this Aetheric Clot event. All Rituals cancelled! No more can be performed for 3 turns! That means my Deceit + Destruction resist rituals are cancelled, and Zael is free from my Daemonic Interference. Disaster!

But then I reassert myself. No rituals for 3 turns? From anyone? That means they can’t Pilfer Artifact any more. How do they plan to win?

It must be something from the reopened Bazaar. Sure enough, Peter has bought this artifact, the Broken Oath Sword. It has the Dismissal ability, which returns opposing attachments to their owner’s vault if any Melee damage is inflicted. This means that all he has to do is attach this thing to one of his legions with a higher melee stat than my stronghold and run it in, which will detach the Black Monolith in the melee phase, and then the stronghold will die in the infernal phase. The Aetheric Clot was so that I can’t use rituals to fuck with his legions while he does this.

I’m dead.

Well, unless he’s stupid enough to run his good legion in first, in which case a little prep work I did last turn will mess him up: this stratagem card gives my stronghold a big ranged boost, and his legion is weak to ranged. If he does run it in first, it’ll die.

But unfortunately he also has a second nearby legion, the amusingly-named 10,000 Screaming Bastards, which is a joke unit with equally funny stats. We laughed about this at the time, and I expressed doubt that it was useful in any way unless the 3 movement stat could be leveraged somehow. Well, they’re exactly 3 hexes away from my stronghold. If he suicides them into it he’ll burn the stratagem card in that combat, and then his good legion will be free to kill it.

There is literally nothing I can do about this. I don’t have access to rituals. I don’t have access to the Bazaar. I can’t attach anything else to the stronghold. The Army of the Fallen was killed last turn, and I suicided my starting legion into Skippy’s. My only remaining legion is the Sons of Typhon, and they’re down by Pandaemonium.

Hindsight is a fine thing. I shouldn’t have just sat on my ass and assumed the stronghold was invincible short of a successful Pilfer Artifact. I should have kept them distracted. I should have moved the Sons up towards Peter’s stronghold two turns ago. If I’d done that I’d be able to kill him this turn before he killed me.

I can’t believe I’m about to be killed by irony.

Turn 49

But not for another turn. I can only assume Peter is just as paranoid as I am, because he’s spent a turn reshuffling his forces instead of attacking. Maybe he’s worried about what happens after I’m dead.

He’s 26 points ahead of Skippy, and I don’t know how elections work in this version of the game – the encyclopedia says it takes between 5 and 13 turns, so the game will go until turn 55 at least, giving Skippy time to catch him. But if it ever looks like Peter is going to win, Skippy can just do what I did and take Pandaemonium with an Infernal Juggernaut legion. Or excommunicate himself and blow up Peter’s stronghold. All of Peter’s legions are in range of my stronghold now, but they’re also coincidentally blocking any advance from Skippy (not that they’d be much more than a speedbump). I can’t think of another reason to delay this by another turn.

I’ve stuck a bunch of strategem cards to Pandaemonium to poison it a bit in the hope that they’ll persist after I’m dead (as other PoP attachments have done after structures have reverted to neutral). And as one last kick in the shin, I’m also going to try to move the Sons to get Skippy’s legion near Pandaemonium. With no other legions or rituals available that’s all the agency I have left in this game. There’s nothing else to do.

Turn 50

Uh. Okay.

I am speechless when I see the turn notification pop up in Steam during a game of Mechabellum. Usually it says “New turn”, but this time it says “Game finished”. There is only one way that the game could have finished on turn 50: I have won.

But I have no idea how.

After reviewing the turn, and going over it in depth with the other players, I still have no idea how.

Skippy’s legion attacked my stronghold first to burn its stratagem card. They won the combat, reducing the stronghold’s HP to zero. Because it still has the Black Monolith attached to it, Skippy did not capture the stronghold, and its HP was reset to 1.

Peter then attacked with his Broken Oath Sword legion. He’s been boosting it with manuscripts so it has a frankly disgusting statline of 4-26-12 (it would have given the Sons a run for their money), against the stronghold’s 5-6-2.

What should happen here is that the stronghold wins the Ranged round, inflicting 1 damage to the legion; the legion then wins the Melee round, inflicting twenty melee damage to the stronghold and detaching the Black Monolith. Peter wins the combat, captures the stronghold, and I die.

What actually happens, though, is that the stronghold wins the Ranged round, inflicts 1 damage to Peter’s legion… and then the combat ends. There is no Melee round, the Broken Oath Sword doesn’t get a chance to detach the Black Monolith, and the stronghold remains in my hands.

And because turn 49 was the fifth of the five turns I needed to hold Pandaemonium for, I survive the turn and win the game at the start of turn 50.

I probably shouldn’t be complaining too much here, but this is a very unsatisfying way to win. There has been a lot of inadvertent discovery of counterintuitive mechanics and obscure edge cases during this multiplayer game, mostly by Skippy. For all of them, though, we eventually managed to find something buried in the encyclopaedia that explained it, or the actual interaction between two artifacts became somewhat apparent in hindsight.

Here, though, there’s nothing in the rules or the tooltips or anything that even gives a hint as to why the climactic battle finished without proceeding to the Melee round. Everything in the game up until this point, and everything in the encyclopaedia, says that Peter should have won and I should be dead. That I am not looks an awful lot like a bug rather than an intended game mechanic. (I even submitted a bug report about it in the hope that the developers can at least tell me what on earth happened.)

Now, there is another part of me that thinks that if Peter hadn’t delayed for the extra turn and had instead sent the 10,000 Screaming Bastards into my stronghold on turn 48, he would have at least had one last turn as a buffer in case anything did go wrong with this crucial play. Skippy and Peter left zero room for getting screwed by the game like this, and paid the price.

But then they shouldn’t have had to. The fun of a game like Solium Infernum is trying to predict what the other players will do, not trying to predict how basic game mechanics will work. The remake has gone to great lengths to remove a lot of the RNG from the game – most mechanics in the original relied on dice rolls to some degree, which have been almost completely excised from the game outside of rituals — and so it’s absurd that I can be in the position of winning a game without having a clue how I did it.

Ah, well. Everyone else might have spent the entire game stepping on landmines, but I had a wonderful time planning, plotting and scheming. I’m also vindicated by the discovery that my move on Pandaemonium was the correct play: Zael did pick me as his Kingmaker puppet, although he told the other players that he’d picked Tom. The final turn was a bit of an anticlimax and it doesn’t feel like a real victory, but I used literally everything I had to get where I was and while there were a few key misplays I don’t think I could have executed on my overall gameplan much better than I did. So if you delete the last turn from the record, I’m actually pretty happy with it.

I’ll type up some final thoughts about the remake as a whole as a quasi-review later; for now, this is where I’ll leave it: with Mammon somewhat undeservedly being crowned the Lord of Hell.

Back to contents

The post Apocalypse Begrudge Tempestuous – Part 5 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is Part 4 of a 5-part diary of a Solium Infernum multiplayer game. For Part 3, go here. For full context, see the contents post here.

Turn 40

The Angel has taken out Skippy’s guys that were next to my Stronghold… and then went after the Sons of Typhon, who smacked it in the face and killed it.

I don’t have time to take this turn before work, and Peter contacts me during the day wondering if Zael is the Kingmaker. This is a relic you can take at the start of the game. It takes all 3 of your relic slots. The way it works is, you select a player as a “puppet” during the first 10 turns of the game. If that player eventually “wins” the game via Prestige, you win instead.

It’s a tremendously high-risk play as you’re trading all of your relic slots on a 1 in 4 chance of guessing right who is going to win, but Zael has been doing very little to attack me despite being part of the anti-me coalition with Peter and Skippy, and this has made Peter suspicious enough that he’s talking to his arch-rival to see if I can find anything out about it. I think Zael’s behaviour is a bit weird, but it’s so unlikely that somebody would take this relic in their very first game that it’s a very outside chance. Still, by coincidence I did Dark Augury Zael last turn and my max level Prophecy stat means Dark Augury now reveals his relics as well as his stats and rituals, so later that night I boot up the game and have a look.

Shit. He is the Kingmaker.

Notably I can’t see who he’s decided to Kingmake; during the first ten turns of the game I wasn’t exactly doing a great deal and wouldn’t have been a fantastic bet. But the fact that he’s gone a bit passive now that I’ve taken the lead does indicate that things are going his way, and it’s probably me.

This completely changes things. For starters, it means my chances of actually winning the game just disappeared straight down the toilet. The only way I can win by Prestige is if Zael is dead. Given the rules around wars, you’re only allowed to eliminate a player if you’ve won 3 Vendettas against them, or if they’ve excommunicated themselves by attacking Pandaemonium. Zael is probably not going to excommunicate himself, which means someone needs to win 3 Vendettas against him. I currently have 0. The only way to force a Vendetta against him is to make a Demand for an artifact (he currently has zero artifacts). This will take one turn to send the demand, one turn for him to respond, a third turn to set the terms of the Vendetta, and then at least one additional turn to actually win it. That’s probably 5-6 turns per Vendetta, plus some number of additional turns to declare a Blood Feud and kill him And there’s only 15 turns left in the game.

So I need to completely reorient my strategy. No more Prestige. Instead I need to take and hold Pandemonium for 5 turns in order to win this. And that’s going to be extremely difficult, since it’s going to be incredibly obvious to everyone that that’s what I’m doing the moment I start to move the Sons of Typhon south – there’s nothing down there except Pandaemonium. As soon as I attack it I’ll be excommunicated, and I’ll have to hold my Stronghold and Pandaemonium at the same time, against everyone else. And while I’m confident of being able to take any one player in a war, I can’t take all of them at once.

Still, what else am I going to do? Let Zael win?

I let Peter, Skippy and Tom know the score. I don’t know if this is helpful at all, but Peter and Skippy already suspect and can probably put the pieces together themselves. Meanwhile I need to do a massive buildup of legions, praetors and artifacts. I need to get my Wrath to 4 to increase my maximum legion cap so that I can buy an additional legion. And then, hopefully around turn 48-49-ish, I need to make a play for Pandaemonium. It’s an incredibly slim chance, but it’s all I’ve got left.

Turn 41

This is going to be absolute chaos. There’s no way I can hide what I’m doing. I’m moving the Sons south, now. Less time everyone else has to prepare for this, the better. I can only hope that Skippy and Peter get distracted about what happens after I’m dead, as Peter will be the leader by then.

I’ve been outbid on a cool Infernal boosting artifact in the Bazaar by Peter, so that’s not a brilliant start. I do have the Devourer, which I’ve been keeping in my back pocket all game; I will pull it out just before everything kicks off. But Skippy’s legions are scary once they’re boosted with Stratagems. I’ll need some additional juice to hold him off. The remaining artifact selection isn’t great, but I have enough Praetors already – you can only attach one per legion. I bid on a cheap artifact that negates other legion’s abilities in the hope that something better appears next turn.

I have just realised, though: if I go for Pandaemonium I need to hold both it and my Stronghold for 5 turns to win the game. Holding the Stronghold is going to be the hard part because it’s very close to Skippy and if I lose it I’m dead. But Peter does have that “make a PoP uncapturable” artifact — the Black Monolith — and I assume that includes my Stronghold. If I can nick it, and I have enough +Deceit resist to stop somebody from stealing it back, my chances suddenly become a lot better.

It’ll piss Peter off, and just when we were starting to be friends again. But it’s all hollow words; they’ll have figured out by now that this is the only thing that I can do.

Turn 42

The problem with Solium Infernum is that your paranoia really does start to get the better of you after 40 turns of plotting. I am starting to wonder if this is all an elaborate scheme between Skippy, Peter and Zael to get me to excommunicate myself and give up the Prestige victory. It was awfully convenient that Peter came to me with the idea that Zael was the Kingmaker – but if that’s the case, at least one of them would be screwing themselves over. Either Zael has genuinely picked me as his puppet and is giving that up, or he’s picked one of Skippy or Peter and they’re gambling on a coin flip that it’s the other one and that they can still win. The comedy option is that Zael picked Tom, in which case his Kingmaker crown is genuinely useless and it’d make sense that he’d leverage it the only way he could – but then he still loses when Peter or Skippy win.

There might be some angle to this that I’m missing. Maybe I’m discounting the desire for revenge a little too much. I think the odds are that this is all exactly as it appears to be, especially because nobody knew I’d only just gotten max level Dark Augury and could see Zael’s relics. I’m going to look bloody stupid if I’m wrong, giving up an assured Prestige victory for a one in ten shot at Pandaemonium – but I simply cannot take that chance. If this is a trick, it’s an unnecessary one, because I was locked into this course of action as soon as I saw the Kingmaker crown.

Boot up the turn, and immediately something goes wrong.

Somebody targets me with this Paladin event, which takes out one of my artifacts. Unfortunately for me, it’s the one that lets me summon The Devourer, which was my big surprise for the coming war against Skippy and Peter. That’s just halved my chances of pulling this off.

And my Pilfer Artifact ritual against Peter failed as well. This is all suddenly going extremely badly. I’ll just have to try again. The Black Monolith is potentially game-winning, and too important to be left alone.

However, this artifact, the Orb of Oblivion, has just turned up in the Bazaar. Its Oblivion ability is mutually assured destruction; anything that kills the legion it’s attached to will also die. If I buy a cheap legion with 3 movement (and there’s a couple of those available at the moment) and strap this to it, I might be able to suicide bomb somebody’s Stronghold as my opening move.

I’ve also got a Capricious Wrath event card that will randomly kill an opposing legion. Don’t know which legion it will kill, but every little helps.

I notice Skippy is also moving up a legion towards Pandaemonium. It’s complete shit, but its Teleport ability will let it bypass Tom’s territory, which is otherwise blocking the approach to Pandaemonium for Skippy and Zael. He’s doing this for one of two reasons:

1. He’s trying to body block me. If my calculations are right, this won’t work; he goes first this turn, but then I’m before him in the turn order meaning that if I attack Pandaemonium next turn with my first order there’s nothing he can do about it.
2. He wants to strap the Orb of Oblivion to it and suicide bomb the Sons of Typhon after I’ve attacked Pandaemonium. Which would be annoying.

I toss some more Souls and Hellfire into my bid for the Orb, just in case. Skippy can make even weak legions pretty powerful with Wrath rituals, which I’m reasonably sure he’s maxed out by now, but I’ll just have to worry about that as and when he does it.

I can’t get distracted though. Peter has a legion within striking distance of my Stronghold, and it’s powerful enough to one-shot it. I need at least two adjacent legions to body-block him, which means moving the Army of the Fallen back up and then also buying another legion from the Bazaar and moving that into place. That’s 3 actions.

I need another two actions for the Sons of Typhon to reach and attack Pandaemonium, which is another turn at least. I might wait another turn after that so that I’m Regent on the turn after I get excommunicated, which would let me go first and potentially blow up Skippy’s base before he can react.

That leaves me with 7 actions before the Big Play. Two to move the Hounds of Hell to threaten Skippy. Another 1 to strap the nuke to them (assuming I have the winning bid). Leaving just four moves to do other things. The margins are getting pretty damn thin.

Turn 43

More paranoia. Peter is Regent the turn before I am. What if he excommunicates himself by hitting Pandaemonium with a Destruction Ritual, and then one-shots my base before I can react?

Madness. I’m still in the Prestige lead, but Peter is only 15 points behind me and 40-odd points ahead of Skippy. All he has to do is sit back and watch me explode while holding off Skippy, and he’ll win. It’s Skippy who might make a desperation play, but aside from the one legion he’s moving towards Pandaemonium there’s nothing obviously sus going on there.

Ah shit. The Bazaar is shut. That’s going to really mess everything up, as I was banking on buying at least one more legion to hold off Peter. Once I’m excommunicated I lose access to the Bazaar regardless, so I effectively can’t buy anything else for the rest of the game. I’ll have to make do with stealing things. Or trying to, anyway.

On the bright side, my second attempt to steal the Black Monolith from Peter went through. That should buy me some time.

On the not so bright side, despite me bidding over twice as much as the Orb of Oblivion was worth Skippy still won the auction for it. (That or the game didn’t accept my overbid somehow because it required me to click “Place bid” again after adding the extra tokens, or something stupid like that.)  This is getting very sticky. I think I’m going to have to try to steal it from him. That or try to blow up his suicide bomb legion somehow.

A realisation. That artifact I bought a couple of turns ago that negates opposing legion’s named abilities? Oblivion is a named ability, albeit on an artifact rather than a legion. Have I mentioned that the in-game encyclopaedia has maybe three sentences per item/mechanic and doesn’t go into anywhere near enough detail for Solium Infernum, a game with so many edge cases it doesn’t actually have any solid sides to speak of? So I have no idea if it will actually work or not. It’ll be a last resort only.

Usually I spend two actions per turn collecting tribute, but since the Bazaar is shut there’s not much point amassing more than I already have, so my actions this turn are expended on moves and rituals. The Sons of Typhon could take Pandaemonium this turn, but I’m swerving aside and ending my turn next to it instead. Army of the Fallen is moving up to a position where it can support my Stronghold; adjacent legions provide 50% of their combat stats as support, so the more legions I have next to the Stronghold the harder it is to take. And I’m moving my starter legion back towards the Stronghold as well. It’s crap, but I’ll need everything to survive this.

Meanwhile, I do a Dark Augury on Skippy so that I can see inside his vault to potentially steal the Orb of Oblivion next turn. I also speculatively target his strongest legion with a Convert Legion ritual – I doubt it will work, but the Bazaar being shut makes it extremely awkward for him if it does. And my last action is spent on the kill-a-random-legion event.

In-game diplomatic activity has completely ceased. Nobody is amassing prestige any more. Everyone can see what’s coming. Zael is absolutely passive; I wonder if it’s worth hitting him with Daemonic Interference now? This will shut down his ability to cast rituals and he might be planning to hit me with Deceit rituals next turn; on the other hand I have a whopping 13 Deceit resistance to his 7 Deceit power.

Or, both Peter and Zael have their Prophecy high enough to cast Malediction of the Seer, which would prevent me from being Regent. They probably wouldn’t do that this turn though.

Another possibility is that Skippy has levelled Destruction to 6; he was on 5 the last time I checked 8 turns ago and he did have a lot of Hellfire, which is required for levelling Destruction, and level 6 gets you the very nasty Planar Lock ritual which reduces the target’s actions by 3. I have 11 Destruction resistance so have a decent chance of shrugging it off – but the problem here is that they only have to be lucky once to completely wreck my plans. There’s a good possibility I start getting seriously hit with stuff this turn, too, if they think I’m going directly for Pandaemonium and don’t wait for the excommunication.

Sod it, I’ll stick to the plan. Daemonic Interference is another little surprise I’ve been keeping in my back pocket and I don’t want to reveal it too early. Just one more turn…

Turn 44

The kill-a-legion event killed one of Zael’s. Which was a disappointing outcome, as I did have a better-than-even chance of taking out one of Skippy’s or Peter’s, which would have helped me a lot more.

Apart from that the last turn went almost perfectly.

The Sons move into position next to Pandaemonium, and afterwards are targeted with two Deceit rituals from Zael (or somebody pretending to be Zael), Forged Orders and Strategic Confusion, which would have otherwise stopped them moving. Both bounce, and award me 16 Prestige into the bargain thanks to Expose Treason. Shame that doesn’t matter any more, really, although it is nice to know that Zael is actually worried about my upcoming Pandaemonium play.

There’s some manoeuvring from the other players. Peter moves a legion down to try and take the Wood of the Suicides (the +2 Deceit strength PoP) but doesn’t manage it this turn. Skippy moves a legion away from his stronghold, and then something very weird happens: it’s targeted with an Infernal Juggernaut ritual, which would otherwise boost its stats by a ridiculous amount, but the legion… resists the ritual. It was definitely Skippy’s ritual, he’s the only person with Wrath 6 and thus the only person who can cast Infernal Juggernaut. If the ritual had succeeded that legion might have been in a good position to one-shot my Stronghold, and it feels like a bug that it failed.

(Postgame note: as far as we can tell, the reason Infernal Juggernaut failed is because Skippy’s legion was in a Ruins hex. Ruins block ritual effects, and – ludicrously – this appears to include friendly rituals.)

Crucially, Skippy does not move his suicide bomb legion. He doesn’t attach the Orb of Oblivion to it either. My Dark Augury against him succeeds, and reveals nothing I don’t already suspect: his relic is a crown that gives him +1 action, and his stats are Wrath 6, Destruction 5, Deceit 4. That last is surprising given that my speculative Convert Legion against his Adamantine Guard went through and I now have a very beefy set of guys lurking next to my Stronghold.

Still, Skippy can probably bulldoze them if he puts Infernal Juggernaut on his starting legion, the Blood of Astaroth. In addition to boosting all stats by 8-12, it’ll also increase its move by 2, to a total of 4. And that puts it in range of my Stronghold from its current position.

My plan to counter that is the Black Monolith. I can just stick that on my Stronghold, and it becomes uncapturable until somebody manages to steal the artifact from me.

Other moves, then. The Adamantine Guard go to the south of my stronghold; this will prevent Skippy’s boosted legion from taking them out as a driveby. I queue up a Pilfer Artifact on the Orb of Oblivion, and the Hounds go towards Skippy’s stronghold in preparation for the suicide bomb attempt (assuming that’s successful). And I target Zael with Daemonic Interference; it’s not that likely to succeed since Zael’s been levelling his Prophecy stat, but he’s the player most likely to disrupt my plans with rituals and if I can land it it’ll be a big help. I can see a problem coming next turn where I’m going to need to Collect Tribute a couple more times in order to keep powering my rituals, but I should have enough to pay all required upkeep for next turn at least..

However, the first move of my turn has to be the attempt on Pandaemonium; this means that only Peter will have a chance to stop me with a ritual, and only if it’s his very first action. I’m really hoping my combat strength calculations are correct. Pandemonium has 11-13-17 and 23hp, and the Sons have 15-24-0 and 25hp. Since damage done is just the difference between each stat, I’d do 4 damage in the Ranged phase, 11 damage in the Melee phase and take 17 damage in the Infernal phase – however the Sons also have a “Melee Twice” attribute, which means I’ll actually deal 22 damage in the Melee round. This is a total of 26 damage, which means I should kill Pandaemonium before it ever gets to the Infernal phase.

Hopefully, anyway.

Click here for Part 5

The post Apocalypse Begrudge Tempestuous – Part 4 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is Part 3 of a 5-part diary of a Solium Infernum multiplayer game. For Part 2, go here. For full context, see the contents post here.

Turn 35

Okay, well, somebody summoned the Angel again. And this time it’s actually a problem for me. It’s possible the Sons could kill it if I attached some melee boosters. Or I could just chuck a sacrificial legion into its path.

That’s a problem for next turn, though, or maybe the turn after. The current development is that Skippy has used his archfiend’s special ability, the Draconic Razzia, to trigger a fun little one-turn war with me, which will kick off next turn. Unsure what the plan is there – the only thing I can think of is that he wants to cut across my territory to take the nearby PoP I never bothered to claim. I’m half-tempted to just let him have it, as I don’t think there’s any Prestige at stake here.

A little unsure what to do next. I can’t move against Skippy as the Draconic Razzia blocks me from sending any diplomatic demands of my own until it’s resolved. Moving against Peter again would be the logical choice as he is technically in the lead and can’t do a damn thing to protect himself from me.

But I also need to make sure Zael can’t get too powerful. His second legion died to the fireball, but Tom’s legion didn’t move – did Zael lock it down with a Deceit ritual?

The good news is: this is now definitely 3 vs 1. This means I don’t need to feel guilty about taking the gloves off.

I’ll Corrupt Tribute on Zael again. I can bully Skippy and Peter with diplomacy, but in order to Vendetta Zael I’d have to march troops halfway across the map, and I’m less confident about Praetor Duels because his increasing Deceit means I can’t easily steal his Praetors. He might be running the +Destruction resist ritual after I blew up two of his legions, but I’ll just have to take that chance.

I’ll also send a Humiliate diplomatic action to Peter. This greatly accelerates the process of getting to Vendetta (which would otherwise require several turns of back and forth as demands are made and responded to) and turns him into a big Prestige pinata.

It could all go horribly wrong for me depending on what the Angel and the Leviathan do. Reasonably sure the Leviathan is going to head north, through Skippy’s territory, up to the Garden of Infernal Delights. But the last turn has shown that it is anything but predictable…

Turn 36

The Leviathan moved north and took out Tom’s legion that was prosecuting the war against Zael. Which is annoying, I don’t think he’ll be able to win that vendetta now.

But. In a thrilling re-enactment of King Kong vs Godzilla, the Angel then moved up to try and kill the Leviathan. That I did not expect. Does the Leviathan count as a faction with military power? They fought each other to a draw, but the Angel came off way worse; it’ll win if it attacks the Leviathan again next turn thanks to having higher Ranged and Melee stats (and also thanks to the Leviathan being on half health after bulldozing Skippy’s legions) but it’s only got 3 HP left. I can definitely take it out with the Sons now if it comes my way.

My Corrupt Tribute action on Zael bounced. I don’t think he had the resist ritual up, I think he’s just levelled Destruction for the passive resist – it’s about time one of my rituals failed anyway.

More importantly, though, Skippy has indeed manoeuvred his troops so that they can take the Unholy Fountain. Which is kind of whatever, but I don’t see why I should just let him have it – and while he goes before me in the turn order, he’ll need to spend an action attaching something to his legion in order to take it in the one turn of hostilities the Draconic Razzia allows. So I can use my first action to cast Strategic Confusion, which prevents the target legion from moving if it hasn’t moved already.

The more worrying thing is that a Dark Augury has told me that Skippy has Destruction 5 and a whole bunch of Hellfire stored up. Probably even odds of his rituals bouncing off of me, but that’s not good enough – I’ll invoke the +Destruction Resist ritual, Evil Ward, as my second action, just in case.

I also have a whole bunch of tribute saved up. I should probably spend it. I can afford level 6 Prophecy, which gives me a fifth and final Ritual slot, and which would also allow me to break Zael’s ritual table and stop him from casting anything. A nice thing to have in my back pocket, just in case.

I should probably also stop running Elocution. If it’s 3 vs 1 now it’s going to be a lot less valuable as all of my opponent’s demands will be directed at me instead of each other.

Zael’s done the same thing I have and dumped all of his Prestige into a Prince upgrade. Which means he can vassalise himself to Skippy next turn if he so wishes. Such is life.

Turn 37

Strategic Confusion bounced, and Skippy’s legion took the Unholy Fountain. It’s possible I overestimated the effectiveness of Deceit. It doesn’t help that the game obfuscates everything and won’t tell you how things are calculated, but I’m starting to think that my sustained thievery of Praetors and Legions a few turns earlier was just good rolls.

Still, overall that’s a good thing: the game’s not as unbalanced it first appeared. If Deceit rituals were the only tools at my disposal I’d be in trouble. Fortunately they are not; I have what looks like the best duelling Praetor in the game currently (thanks Peter), so I’ve fired off a Humiliate to Skippy with a Praetor Duel lined up if he refuses.

Peter for his part accepted the Humiliate I sent to him last turn – a wise move, as I can’t send another one for 3 turns giving him a bit of time to prepare.

I’ve placed a bid for another good duelling Praetor in the Bazaar, just to deny it to everyone else. The problem with Gusion is that he’s very one-dimensional and his moves are all Skulls-type, so if there’s a Praetor who counters Skulls he could be in trouble. And I suspect Praetor Duels are going to be my tool of choice for bullying both Skippy and Zael, when I eventually get around to him.

I’m maintaining Expose Treason and Evil Ward (the Destruction and Deceit resistance boosting rituals), and probably will do so for the rest of the game. I’m cancelling Elocution, and also finally sorting out my Schemes – I can have 3 of them at once, but two of those slots are taken up by Schemes to complete Manuals and Schematics, which require either many purchases from the Bazaar or continual attempts at the RNG by using the Collect Manuscripts action. This is too many actions for my taste, so I’m going to use a Prophecy ritual to cancel one of those this turn and also Plot a new Scheme for next turn. Hopefully I can pull something nice and easy that I’m already doing, which is free Prestige.

There’s a conclave vote coming up to dump a bunch of Abyss Striders into somebody’s territory. If I were them I’d put them all in Skippy’s, so that he can fight them and level up his legions. It’s certainly useless to put them in mine, as I don’t have any PoPs for the Abyss Striders to disrupt and my Legions would one-shot them.

Oh, and the Angel killed the Leviathan, but not before the Leviathan took out Tom’s PoP. Tom also declared a Vendetta against Peter to take a PoP, but didn’t spot that Peter’s only PoP has an attached artifact – the Black Monolith – that gives it the Shadow Shield attribute, which makes it uncapturable. I’ll have to talk to him again soon to see if there’s anything I can do to help him, as he’s proving a distraction for the other players at the very least.

Not sure where the Angel will go next. Looking at the map it’s not impossible it goes after my starting Legion, which is lurking on the other side of Peter’s territory. I might just have to let them die if it does.

Turn 38

 Ah, the Humiliation was delivered to Skippy just in time – he’s now played the Diplomatic Immunity event, which prevents him from being targeted by hostile diplomatic actions for 5(!) turns.

That could still throw a bit of a spanner in the works as I still lose out on a Humiliate I could otherwise have sent in 3 turns time. But the more worrying thing is Peter, who managed to get 15-20 Prestige last turn and is still in the lead despite me bullying him. He’s high in Charisma, does he have the ritual that gives him prestige per turn? Perhaps I should Dark Augury him again.

Incoming scheme selection isn’t tremendous despite me getting 4 picks. I think the most likely one is “Cast 5 Prophecy rituals”, which I will definitely do before the end of the game, it’ll just take around 10 turns to pay out.

(Although I’ve just realised that Evil Ward and Expose Treason are also both Prophecy rituals. Will they count if I’m maintaining them instead of actively casting them?)

I’m going to send a Humiliation to Zael, but I’ve hit a tiny snag: he bought a Praetor last round that I’m fairly sure was pretty beefy. I can send Gusion in and I think this gives me the best chance of success – but Gusion is already fighting Skippy, if Skippy refuses his Humiliation. And if Gusion loses that duel somehow, he’ll be dead and unable to fight in the duel against Zael.

I could send the Praetor I bought from the Bazaar last round, Naphula. She’s a little less powerful, so I think I’m only assured of victory with her if bribe the referee. And I still don’t know how that works because after 3 attempts nobody has yet actually answered the challenge and sent a Praetor to duel against me.

I’ll send Naphula. This could go horribly wrong and I could lose them both, plus a big chunk of Prestige. But it’s the best option I’ve got to squeeze some Prestige out of Skippy and Zael.

The Angel took out one of Tom’s legions – he really cannot catch a break. I have absolutely no idea who it’s going to go for next. Worst case is that it decides to go for my starting legion and bulldozes Tom’s remaining legions to do it. Best case is that it goes for Skippy.

Turn 39

Oh my god, this Angel. It’s just taken out another one of Tom’s legions, seemingly for no reason.

Skippy rejected the Humiliation. Perhaps now I will find out how Praetor Duels actually work.

Another garbage selection of Schemes. The best one available is “Make a Demand with the Infernal Negotiations ritual active”, which is two actions only, but Demands are less effective than Humiliate.

Skippy’s moved his troops worryingly close to my Stronghold. A potential play here is that he gets himself excommunicated by hitting Pandaemonium with a Destruction ritual and kills me in one turn, so I’m moving the Sons back to try and head that possibility off. The Angel might come this way, also, so on turn 39 I’m finally going to get something out of the vault and use it: Haagenti, a Praetor who will boost the Sons’ Melee attribute by 5.

Maintaining Expose Treason/Evil Ward does not count as successful Prophecy rituals for the purposes of the scheme I picked up last turn, so I’m going to have to do it by Dark Augurying people.

Peter’s picked up another 10 Prestige since last turn. He gets +5 from his PoPs, so I have no idea where the other 5 came from – he’s only running Elocution… wait, shit, if I’m sending a Humiliate to Skippy, Peter and Zael on a rota every turn then they all get a steady Prestige income from Elocution.

I’ll send another Humiliate to Peter next turn. He’s levelled 3 powers to level 4 now, which together with a powerful artifact he’s picked up that grants +1 orders means he has 6 orders. He’s still very weak militarily so can be bullied with Vendettas, but if I lose the Praetor Duels against Skippy and Zael I’m in big trouble.

Click here for Part 4

The post Apocalypse Begrudge Tempestuous – Part 3 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is Part 2 of a 5-part diary of a Solium Infernum multiplayer game. For Part 1, go here. For full context, see the contents post here.

Turn 29

We’re coming up on the inflection point, I have 6 points in Deceit (which gives me access to the Convert Legion ritual, allowing me to steal enemy legions) and 4 in all other stats except for Wrath, giving me the maximum 6 actions per turn; this means I no longer need to pretend to be weak and feeble and can actually start attacking people. Thanks to a timing miscalculation I didn’t manage to get the Infernal Negotiations ritual back up in time for the Diplomatic Immunity event to expire, so I think either Skippy and Peter will finally Demand on me now. If they don’t, I’m going to do it to them next turn.

I have plans to handle Peter and Skippy (mostly involving stealing legions and/or pulling The Devourer out of my ass), I need not to let Tom and Zael out of my sight though. Zael in particular has been too quiet for too long and is getting a bit too into the backroom machinations, although a Dark Augury on turn 21 didn’t reveal anything particularly worrying. Maybe Dark Augury again at some point to make sure he’s not catching me up in the Ritual stakes.

Skippy’s sheer number of legions is intimidating and I probably can’t kill them all with Rituals (I have referred to this in PMs as a “Zapp Brannigan-ass strategy”), but I’ve checked and Convert Legion is “very likely” to work on his super-legion, the Sons of Typhon, because he’s not upgraded his Deceit stat at all to give himself any Deceit resistance. This seems hugely OP if true, although also somewhat self-inflicted – Zael is the only other person who has gone in on Deceit at all.

A thought occurs: Skippy is floating a ridiculous number of resources and might rush Deceit upgrades, which would give him a better chance of resisting my Deceit rituals. If I’m going to steal the Sons of Typhon I’d better do it soon while it’s a relatively sure thing. But this will immediately reveal that I have 6 Deceit. Although that might not be too much of an issue, because…

Annoyingly, after I sabotaged myself by very briefly posting a screenshot in the main channel revealing I had five order slots that I’m pretty sure Skippy saw before I deleted it, the game itself has also decided to sabotage me by giving me an achievement for raising Deceit to max level which is clearly visible in the Steam activity feed. Because that’s a sensible thing to have in a game that’s all about hidden information. Thanks, Solium Infernum developers, I really wanted everyone else to know that.

Anyway, if they don’t Demand on me next turn they’re absolutely nuts – playing the Diplomatic Immunity event did tip my hand a bit in that it let them know I was worried about being attacked, which means they should attack me as soon as it finishes. But I have achieved my Final Form now and I’m reasonably sure I can 1v2 them.

Oh, and I’ve been moving my one legion down to Pandaemonium, mostly because the revelation that Skippy was trying for it so early was a bit of a shock and I’d like a fallback option just in case my Rituals turn out to be less effective than I hope. I’ll need a much better legion than those failures to actually do anything, but having the cantons secured is probably a good thing.

Turn 30

Neither Peter or Skippy have sent Demands. They’re continuing to bully Tom.

Actually having to look at Demands now, I’m not sure how useful this actually will be? I need to actually fight a war to get anything out of it once the Demand is refused, which is, you know, fine. But also Zael is sitting there and I think he’s only a bit behind me because he just achieved two(!) “Have 3 rituals simultaneously” schemes, which means he’s levelled up his Prophecy from 1 to 4 in 9 turns in order to have enough ritual slots to do that. If I get distracted, he might pounce.

The Humiliate diplomatic action becomes available when you increase your Infernal Rank to Prince, which is like an Insult but you choose the terms of the resulting vendetta – the problem with Insults is that your opponent gets to choose between resolving it in a regular war or via a Praetor duel and they’ll pick whichever one you’re weakest in, so you’d better be damn sure you can win both if you’re Insulting somebody. The nice thing about Humiliate is that if you just want to mug somebody for Prestige it’s actually better than a Demand, since it has a shorter turnaround time before you can declare a vendetta and allows you to bully them more frequently. But that Prince upgrade is 90 Prestige, though! There are other benefits to getting it, like increased tribute quality and ritual resistance, but 90 Prestige is a game-winning amount.

Skippy has been blowing his resources on stuff from the Bazaar. Which means he’s very unlikely to have levelled his stats, and my Rituals should still work just fine.

I’m going to make a slight modification to the plan. Try to steal the Sons and also Demand on Skippy for an artifact. Who knows, he might actually cough one up since he’s been buying so many! If not, it’s Devourer time.

I’ve had a chat with Tom, trying to coordinate our efforts. I’ve given him a bunch of intelligence on Skippy and told him not to target the Sons with anything since it’ll just be wasted if I manage to Convert them. He’s apparently only just got his third order, so I think at this stage of the game he’s the safest bet for an ally. Zael is playing the game the same way I am, which means he’s a fundamentally untrustworthy snake who is biding his time and if I take my eyes off him for a second I’m going to lose on turn 50.

Finally, I’ve picked up the Leviathan event, which spawns a monster that goes around taking PoPs. I have no PoPs, so this will be an excellent bit of chaos to throw into the mix.

Turn 31

Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn.

The Sons are now on my team, and the Leviathan is here and has spawned in a great place to threaten both Peter and Skippy. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that I’ve just noticed that the unclaimed PoP Peter has been moving his legion towards, the Wood of the Suicides, gives a +2 Deceit bonus. The stronger your Deceit is the more chance you have of resisting a hostile Deceit ritual, so I am sure he is frantically levelling his Deceit normally as well, as Zael has also been targeting him – he’s complained about being hit with Deceit rituals the last four turns, but I’ve only hit him once.

The worse news is that Peter goes before me in the turn order. If he takes that PoP with his first order of the turn there’s nothing that I can do to stop it. This will be much less fun if he can actually resist my rituals.

Even without the Sons, Skippy managed to one-shot Tom’s strongest legion with a stratagem – these are renamed combat cards from the original game, which you can stick to a legion for a one-off stat boost. They’re consumed after a single combat but they’re potentially much more powerful than artifact or praetor bonuses and they can’t be stolen with rituals in the way that regular legion attachments can. Skippy’s stratagem give his legion +8 Ranged, which is a bit disgusting. There’s nothing that can be done to stop him from winning that vendetta now.

And I’ve just realised that Zael’s high Prophecy now means Dark Augury has a decent chance of bouncing. I’m going to try it anyway, but I’m not hopeful. He’s got a scheme to raise his Deceit to 6, and it shows as 4/6, so I guess I know what he’ll be doing for the next couple of turns at least.

This feels like it’s spiralling out of control a bit. I made my big move a couple of turns earlier than I was comfortable with, but it still might have been too late – everyone else is catching up.

Ah, sod it. There was an alternate path to victory that involved me levelling Charisma to max and using the ritual there that gives 10 prestige per turn. But that would have been incredibly boring. I’d rather do this and lose than continue to pretend I’m a tired old man who doesn’t understand the game.

(I mean, I am, but still.)

Demand to Peter, and try to steal his Legion anyway – it’s the best one currently on the field that isn’t the Sons. Let’s see how this plays out.

Turn 32

Okay, fears somewhat unfounded. Peter did not move his guys with the first order and I managed to steal them before he took the PoP. This means that if he rejects my Demand I can go with a legion-based vendetta.

Meanwhile Skippy rejected my Demand, which one of us is going to end up regretting quite badly. You see, this has let me peek at the Praetor Duels interface and I think that if I nick his one Praetor he can’t actually put anyone up in time to fight.

(Assuming he doesn’t have anyone in the vault. I don’t think he has anyone in the vault. There was that creepy baby-looking thing that got bought by somebody recently, and I really wish I could remember if it was Skippy. Maybe I should start keeping notes.)

Even if I don’t steal his one Praetor I don’t think that Praetor can win against Gusion, the duelling powerhouse Praetor I stole from Peter a few turns back. So maybe I don’t even do anything, and just roll the dice with the duel straight up.

The real choice is how much prestige to wager on the duel. I can blow up to 14 on this, which seems risky for a mechanic that I don’t really understand still. I’ll go with 10, I can probably afford to lose that much.

The Zael situation is getting worrying though. The Dark Augury on him went through and his stat situation is not as bad as I thought, he’s got Deceit and Prophecy at 4, which I already suspected, but everything else is pretty low. The problem is his Schemes – he keeps rolling duplicates. Previously he had two of the “Have 3 Rituals active at once” scheme, which paid out 40 prestige. Now he has two of the “Raise Deceit to 6” scheme, which is going to pay out another 40 prestige, and then he’ll also have Deceit at 6.

Deceit rituals are turning out to be utterly busted. Last turn I got paranoid about Peter levelling up his Deceit to give himself resistance – but based on what I can see this turn, that probably didn’t matter. Zael has a Deceit resistance of 6 that I can see – 4 from his Deceit, and 2 from his infernal rank. This against my Deceit of 6, so you’d think it’d be even odds.

Wrong.

The scrying bowl — which I’m assuming is reasonably accurate given that I just did a Dark Augury on him — is telling me that my chance to steal one of his Praetors is “very likely”. How on earth do you defend against this? There’s a ritual from the Prophecy line that gives +4 Deceit resistance that I might have to turn on pretty soon and run indefinitely, but I suspect that even that wouldn’t tip the odds enough for me to feel safe.

(Postgame note: I figured out how rituals work towards the end of the game and it’s not anywhere near this bad. The scrying bowl was lying to me and I was just very, very lucky with my rolls.)

I’m going to try not to abuse Deceit too much myself as I think it would ruin the game, but I also think Zael is fair game for it for a bit. Especially because he just targeted me with a Vile Calumny against Tom. I’m going to resolve via Praetor Duel, but I’m going to keep the prestige wager small as Tom’s spent the entire game being bullied and I don’t want him to feel like I’m adding to that. Hopefully he’ll understand.

So, Bribe Praetor on Zael’s Praetor that adds a 3 Darkness token to tribute offerings (required for Deceit rituals and Deceit upgrades, should hopefully slow him down a bit if that’s not guaranteed), and steal some of his tribute too. Move my generously-donated legions onto Peter’s border in preparation for a Vendetta. And also Collect Tribute twice.

It’s increasingly looking like the main threats are actually Skippy and Zael, not Skippy and Peter, so I have commiserated with Peter a bit despite having an active Demand against him and stealing one of his legions, and told him what I think Zael is up to. He’ll probably still come after me but he’ll have to get creative doing it.

Turn 33

Aha, turns out it is possible to resist Deceit rituals, as Zael tried to Loot the Vaults against me (while posing as Skippy, or at least I assume so – if it was actually Skippy then that was very stupid) but it bounced. So Deceit 4 vs Deceit resist 8 is what’s needed, which means the Deceit resist +4 ritual might be enough.

Blech, but it costs 1 Darkness per turn. One of the very few restrictions on Deceit is that it’s actually pretty difficult to scrape together the Darkness required to fire the rituals off every turn. I’m taking every Darkness tribute token I can find and barely breaking even.

My own Loot the Vaults against Zael went through but brought back some garbage. Is this the tribute quality other players have to live with? No wonder they’re all behind.

Anyway, Tom is picking a fight with Zael – reasonable, reasonable. Peter says that “he’s not acting rationally” and is happy to play for second. Probably accurate, he doesn’t have enough actions to really compete at this stage.

This does afford me an opportunity though. They probably all think I rushed Deceit as my primary goal, but it’s so much worse than that – because I was levelling up all of my powers for the extra actions I also levelled Destruction. Typically you can’t use Destruction rituals against somebody if they’re not in Vendetta with you – unless you have Ritual Masking from Deceit, which lets you either hide your identity or (at higher Deceit levels) pretend to be somebody else. So I can toss some fireballs Zael’s way and pose as Tom while doing it, and hopefully nobody will be any the wiser.

And the really nice thing about this is that Destruction rituals cost Hellfire, not Darkness. I have a lot of Hellfire saved up, so can do this for a while.

Also Zael sent me a message saying that he was going to “come at me hard” if I stole from him again. Nuking his legions and rotting his tribute tokens isn’t stealing from him, so I assume he’ll be fine with it.

The Leviathan has been disappointing so far. Hasn’t killed a single legion, and Skippy has just retaken the PoP it smashed after it wandered over to Zael. I’m hoping it moves through one of Zael’s legions on the way to the Garden of Infernal Delights at least. Or at least forces Zael to waste actions moving them out of the way.

I’m in two minds about Peter. I don’t doubt that Zael and myself have severely screwed him over with Deceit. (Although now that I think about it he does still have both his public artifacts and praetors, so what exactly did Zael steal? He didn’t do a Dark Augury so wouldn’t have been able to see Peter’s vault. Maybe it was tribute, Peter’s not bought anything from the Bazaar in a while.) Peter is naturally a bit depressed about this. However he also happens to have 86 prestige – he is still a contender, and if he’s left alone he’ll come back into it. He’s also said he was trying to pull together an anti-me alliance (which means that Zael might actually have been telling the truth earlier), and I doubt he’s going to give up on that. Like, what else is he going to do, go after Skippy? Or Zael? I really doubt there’s anything I can do at this point to change his mind on trying to kill me.

So the Vendetta goes ahead, I think. I’d try to kill his legion but he can just run away and his position in the turn order makes that awkward. I do not want his PoP. So it’s taking cantons, which will take 3 orders and 2 turns, or 4 orders and 1 turn. Probably the second option.

The Deceit resistance ritual is going up, and I’m firing off two Destruction rituals against Zael (while pretending to be Tom, let’s see if he falls for it). The problem with taking a more active role is that I want some rituals to resolve first in the turn order so that the targets can’t respond, which means Collect Tribute gets knocked down the turn order, which means I get worse tribute. But I need to stockpile for next turn, when 1) I’ll need to move my legions to take Peter’s cantons and 2) I’ll probably also need to throw a bribe into the arena.

Turn 34

Before I’ve even loaded the game turn there’s some spicy stuff going on: Zael and Tom having a bit of a spat in the channel. Zael is accusing Tom of “ensuring the person who is in 1st” (i.e me) “wins the game”, so I assume he’s a bit upset about the war.

We’re not playing Munchkin, though, and from my perspective Tom is doing exactly the right thing, and not just because it’s helpful to me, either – Tom can’t win a fight against me and he can’t win a fight against Skippy, he could win a fight against Peter but Peter’s sole PoP has an artifact stuck to it that prevents capture. So the best way for him to get back into the game is to beat up the remaining “weakest” target: Zael.

It could all be a ruse, of course: manufactured anger does have its place in this game. Zael’s threatening privately to vassalise to Skippy if I don’t knock it off with the rituals. Usually I’d laugh that out of the room as there are prestige restrictions around vassalisation (the vassal can’t have more than half of the Prestige of the current leader) and there’s not that much space between myself, Skippy, Peter and Zael. But it is a useful look at a possibility I hadn’t considered yet: I don’t just need to have the most Prestige, assuming that one of Peter or Zael vassal to Skippy I need double Skippy’s Prestige.

Also, something extremely bad has apparently happened to Skippy.  Let’s boot the game and find out…

…what the fuck

Leviathan, I take back everything bad I said about you. Instead of heading up to the Garden of Infernal Delights, it’s decided to go for Peter’s PoP which is protected by the Black Monolith (which is supposed to make it un-capturable), which feels illegal but maybe the Leviathan doesn’t give a shit about the rules. More importantly, though, it’s taken a direct route there through three of Skippy’s legions. Who are all dead now. Skippy only has one left.

That’s a huge swing. It’s so huge, in fact, that it might actually be bad for me. Skippy being obviously big and scary was pretty helpful as it split people’s attention. Now that he has nothing left, everyone is going to be focused on me fully.

Not that they weren’t doing that anyway. I got the Deceit resist ritual, Expose Treason, up just in time as two more Loot the Vault rituals are attempted against me, and bounce. One has come from Zael, and the other from Skippy (I don’t think Zael has the ability to pretend to be other people yet).

Let them come – one additional effect of Expose Treason that I get Prestige every time a Deceit ritual is successfully resisted. So that’s 16 Prestige this turn. Please, try again!

My fireball melted one of Zael’s legions, the ritual that destroys tribute tokens only got 3 of them though.

Neither Zael nor Tom sent anyone to the arena to fight the Praetor Duels, meaning they forfeit. That’s another 37 Prestige.

I now have 146 Prestige. Skippy is next highest with 96, and then Peter with 90, and Zael with 81. Tom languishes on 22.

This is a problem, as the threshold for vassalisation is now 73 Prestige. Maybe I should dump 90 Prestige on that Prince upgrade after all. I’d have it for 20-odd turns – would it pay for itself? Could I make it worth it with Humiliate?

Some coordination with Tom. I have no idea who will win in a fight between his legion and Zael’s, there’s too many permutations and Zael goes before Tom in the turn order. Annoyingly the scrying bowl now claims my Deceit rituals against Zael’s legions are “a coin flip” – they definitely weren’t two turns ago, maybe there’s some interaction there with Dark Augury.

Still, Destruction works perfectly fine. So I’m going to fireball Zael’s legion, which I am sure he will be even more upset about, but I’m also going to buy the Prince upgrade, which knocks me down to 56 Prestige. Assuming I win the Vendetta against Peter that should bring me back up to 75-odd, and then I can make a few more Demands on people. Or even Humiliate!

Click here for Part 3

The post Apocalypse Begrudge Tempestuous – Part 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is Part 1 of a 5-part diary of a Solium Infernum multiplayer game. For full context, see the contents post here.

To start us off, let’s get a look at the competition.

The players

Unlike the original Solium Infernum you don’t get to build your own custom archfiend, which is a bit of a disappointment. Instead you pick from one of 8 specific premade archfiends. Each has a slightly different starting statline that leans into what their strength is supposed to be, and there’s some limited customisation available via picking Relics before game start, which grant permanent bonuses throughout the game. (Some of which are pretty massive if you’re willing to devote all three Relic slots to one bonus.) The real differentiating factor, though, are each archfiend’s special abilities and Stronghold bonuses.

Skippy is playing Astaroth, a classical horned demon with a big sword whose thing is military conquest. Usually you need to go through a few turns of setup to declare war on somebody as you need to set up a casus belli and make a Prestige wager while doing so, but Astaroth’s special ability is that he can just declare limited wars on people with much less setup time. His Stronghold also provides combat support bonuses to adjacent legions, making it an extremely tough nut to crack for anyone looking to outright eliminate him in a war.

Tom is playing Erzebet, another conquest-focused archfiend. Her ability is a one-way Open Borders agreement with other archfiends; usually it’s impossible to enter a hex controlled by someone else without declaring war on them, which makes it difficult to leverage military power against faraway targets.  If somebody accepts her diplomatic proposal, though, Erzebet’s legions can freely pass through their territory. So no-one is really safe from her legions. Her Stronghold has a “Healing rate +1” ability, although it’s unclear whether this is a local bonus that applies only to the stronghold or a global bonus that applies to all her legions.

Zael is playing Belial, a schemer and deceiver. His special power is that he can goad two players into fighting one another by gossiping that one has insulted the other. If the player who was supposedly insulted lets it go, they lose Prestige. The catch is that Belial has to wager some prestige of his own to do this, and if the insulted player decides to trigger a vendetta they keep that Prestige, so it’s not completely free. His stronghold gives him +1 to Deceit ritual strength, making it easier for him to steal things from other players while they’re not looking. Or even if they are looking.

Peter is playing Andromalius, who looks like Remiel from Lucifer. (The comic, not the TV show.) His thing is Praetor duels; all of his Praetor moves do +2 damage, which is actually quite a lot – certainly enough to swing the duel in his favour and give him a significant advantage. His Stronghold gives him +1 voting power in Conclave votes – these occur every 10 turns and do things like reshuffling the turn order or redistributing everyone’s tribute. Not tremendously useful, but the duelling bonus more than makes up for it.

And I am playing Mammon, the money guy. Mammon’s diplomatic power is that they can offer other players a boost: +1 tribute token drawn and picked when taking the Collect Tribute action. The catch is that any unpicked tokens, which would usually be discarded, instead go to Mammon. Mammon’s Stronghold provides an additional tribute token in the tribute package everyone gets when they become Regent (Solium Infernum’s term for the start player), and I also took Relics that increased tribute quality and gave a further additional tribute token pick – doing anything in this game requires money, so having an effective +1 to my Infernal Rank for tribute purposes for the entire game will hopefully give me a lot of flexibility.

Turns 1-25

Are something that I didn’t diarise at the time. From my point of view it was rather dull, for reasons that I’ll go into later. But there were some highlights.

(Crude hex map is necessary because there’s no way of revisiting a game once it’s finished and even if you could it’s not possible to zoom out enough to get this kind of view. Also, the terrain wraps around so that if you went off the eastern edge of this map you’d reappear at the western edge, making directionality a bit of a nonsense – so I’ve opted for a Mammon-centric projection of Hell, mostly because that’s how I was thinking about the game anyway.)

I spawned with Skippy to my north-west, Tom to my north-east, and Peter uncomfortably close  to my south-west, with just 3 hexes separating our strongholds. Zael was further to the north-west past Skippy and Tom – far enough away that it would be very difficult for us to fight each other in a vendetta. To my south, along a single hex-width strip of land between cliffs and a chasm, was a route to Pandaemonium, Hell’s capital city.

Pandaemonium’s location is important because Solium Infernum has a few ways to win; the common one that everyone is working towards for most of the game is the Prestige Victory, where the person with the most Prestige at the end of the game wins. There’s a whole bunch of ways to get Prestige but the most useful tools are diplomatic actions such as Insults and Demands, as these will either lead to a war which you can win for a huge amount of prestige, or your opponent caves to the insult/demand and forfeits Prestige of their own – either way you’re gaining Prestige while your opponents lose it.

If it looks like you’re falling behind in Prestige and don’t think you can catch up, though, there’s an alternative: take and hold Pandaemonium for 5 turns without dying. This is harder than it sounds because all it takes to eliminate somebody from the game is to capture their starting Stronghold. Usually there are very strict rules governing how archfiends can declare war on one another which make it very difficult, if not impossible, to do this during the normal course of play. If you attack Pandaemonium, though, you get excommunicated and you are no longer protected by those rules, and anyone can murder you. This means that in order to pull off a Pandaemonium victory you need to be very strong militarily, as every other player will be trying to stop you by taking your Stronghold — and not only that, but they’ll be actively cooperating in order to do it.

The game started with a scramble for Places of Power, locations on the map that have garrisons that need to be defeated in order to capture them, but which provide a steady Prestige income and other passive bonuses, some of which are actually pretty damn good.  Everyone else grabbed theirs in the first 10 turns, while I marched my starting legion in a circle around the nearest one to me to claim the territory, but didn’t take it because my starting legion was so crap that it would have taken 4-5 actions to do it. Since you only start the game with 2 actions per turn, this was nowhere near worth it for a PoP that granted a measly +1 prestige per turn with no other bonuses.

Tom targeted me with the first Demand of the game. A Demand is the lowest form of diplomatic action — you demand some money from somebody, and if they don’t give it to you you can declare Vendetta on them. A Vendetta is a war with a limited goal: taking a certain number of hexes, killing some of their legions, or capturing their Places of Power. I refused the demand because I needed the tribute for other things, and Tom duly declared war on me. It probably would have gone well for him, except…

A turn later, somebody played an event card that summoned an Angel from Heaven to break some heads. The Angel flies around killing one legion from each player, and once it’s had its fill of blood it buggers off back to Heaven. It targets players in order of military strength, and it seems it does take unit level into account, which meant it hit Tom before it hit me and killed his only legion. For most players this was only a temporary annoyance since the starting legion eventually respawns (all other legions are out of the game permanently once they are killed), but this delay meant Tom was unable to finish the war before the time limit on his Vendetta ran out.

Zael had some serious problems with Abyss Striders, wandering monsters that will randomly attack legions and Places of Power. They’re relatively weak, but his starting legion’s statline was even weaker. This meant he blew a bunch of actions retaking PoPs that the Striders had taken and fell behind.

Still, at least he wasn’t Tom, whose bad luck continued when one of his two PoPs reverted to neutral thanks to another event card. Tom then also wasted a bunch of actions retaking it over several turns. And to make matters worse, Peter targeted him with a Praetor Duel – this is the other way of resolving a refused Demand that sidesteps pure military power, where each player sends a single champion called a Praetor into the arena to duke it out, with the winner hauling away a bunch of Prestige and the loser dying. Since Peter’s specialty is Praetor Duels he won handily.

The first twenty-odd turns proceeded with Skippy firmly in the lead in terms of Prestige, and Peter a bit behind him. Skippy bought an immensely powerful legion from the Bazaar called the Sons of Typhon and spent 5 turns marching it up to an unclaimed Place of Power in Peter’s territory. He was also setting up a war with Peter while this was going on, and it looked like they might actually attack each other for a moment – but it was all a ruse. Skippy’s real plan was to walk straight past the PoP and attack Pandaemonium.

Unfortunately for Skippy Solium Infernum is a game with a ton of byzantine rules and edge cases and the tutorial for the remake is awful and doesn’t explain any of them, which meant he fell foul of the rules around hex ownership and made an illegal move. And when you make an illegal move that takes your legion somewhere it shouldn’t be, it turns out that legion doesn’t just get teleported back to its starting position that turn, oh no; it gets teleported all the way back to your stronghold. Which for Skippy was on the other side of the map. It was kind of a shame, it was a beautiful fake-out and I don’t think anybody realised what he was really doing.

And me? After those desultory opening moves I lapsed into torpor. Didn’t move my single legion, didn’t take any PoPs, didn’t equip anything from the Bazaar, I didn’t even react to the war with Tom except for a single half-hearted attempt to block his legion movement. And for their part everyone else seemed content to ignore me and focus on more immediate threats – although they must have noticed that my Prestige was mysteriously increasing every turn, seemingly of its own accord, without me obviously doing anything. I was finally forced into action when I accidentally took the Prestige lead, something which would have been impossible for the other players to ignore. Fortunately this happened at around the same time as my long-term plan came to fruition…

Some contemporaneous random thoughts, mostly between turns 25-28

I have been left alone for far too long. Tom is the only person who has made any aggressive moves towards me, and that was 20 turns ago. The fact that I’ve spent 20 turns apparently doing nothing should be seriously worrying to everyone else, but they keep going after the visible targets.

I have had the Infernal Negotiations ritual going for the past 10 turns or so, which makes it much more expensive to make Demands of me, so that might be one reason why they haven’t done it. If I were in their position I would have done it anyway, though, because they have no way of decreasing my Prestige without making Demands and it keeps ticking up every turn despite me having no legions, PoPs or Praetors, and making no Demands of anyone else – if nothing else they’d get me to reveal some of my cards, which so far I’ve been keeping completely hidden.

What I’ve actually been doing is investing all of my tribute to level up my Powers. An archfiend has five Power stats, rated from one to six. Most archfiends start the game with two points in one Power and a single point in a couple of others. Increasing a Power gives you access to additional active and passive abilities appropriate to that power – so Prophecy gives you access to information that’s usually hidden, Destruction lets you hurl fireballs at people etc. etc. However, every Power will give you an additional action slot once you level it up to rank four. Given that you start with just two of them, this is a massive relative increase in power – and the faster you get an additional action, the faster you can get tribute to upgrade the other powers so that they grant actions too. I had a third action by turn 10-12, a fourth by turn 16, and a fifth by turn 20.

Levelling Prophecy second was an opportunistic choice as I already had a point in it and I wanted to get to the extra action ASAP, but it ended up being extremely helpful. It looks pretty crap on paper as you can’t use it to blow anyone up until you get to level 6, but being able to see who is getting what from the Bazaar, what Vendetta conditions are, and the Dark Augury ritual are pretty huge. Hell, the additional ritual slots on their own are potentially game-winning – these are powerful spells that require an empty slot and some resources to cast, so the more slots I have via Prophecy the more scope I have to mess with other people’s plans.

Speaking of rituals, Elocution – a Charisma ritual that grants Prestige whenever somebody else makes a diplomatic action — is the unsung MVP of my game so far. One resource per turn upkeep, and it’s brought in something like 45-50 Prestige so far because everyone else won’t stop threatening one another. Weirdly I get Prestige when somebody makes a demand, and then again when the target refuses that demand, which makes Elocution another thing that’s much better than it looks on paper as it’s getting me 8-9 Prestige per Demand made.

Everyone else is sleeping on the Dark Augury ritual, which reveals other archfiend’s statlines and the contents of their vault — their resources and unassigned artifacts and praetors — which would otherwise be hidden. It’s much easier to plan when you know what people have.

Schemes are also pretty powerful. These are quests you can do for a lump sum of prestige, functioning a bit like the tickets from Ticket To Ride; one action spent Plotting gives you 2-4 Schemes to choose from, depending on your Prophecy level. And some of them are hilariously easy, like  “Have 3 active rituals” – oh, you mean that thing I’m doing every turn anyway? There’s a bunch of garbage ones mixed in there mind, the manuscript ones are far too difficult to complete and you only have a limited number of Scheme slots so you can’t just continually pick new Schemes until you find one you like, but it’s still a big source of Prestige and the main reason I was able to keep up with Skippy.

Skippy’s attempted move on Pandaemonium was bold and he masked it well as a move for an untaken PoP, he was very unfortunate to fall foul of rules minutiae. I don’t think it would have worked though. If his move had gone through it would finally have been obvious what he was trying to do and I would have still had one turn to mess the Sons of Typhon up with Deceit rituals, which is all I need.

My thesis is that Skippy is otherwise playing the game all wrong. Military power is public. This means that if you’ve got a strong military you can make threats and bully and people need to give in – but he hasn’t been doing that much. Certainly not the “Demand every single turn” strat required to leverage it properly. And the flipside of military power being public is that people can plan around it. I’ve had a solution in place for his big boys since about two turns after he bought them. And now that we’re in the midgame, military power on its own is the worst way to get things done. He might have some more surprises up his sleeve, of course, and it’s also possible that I have hugely miscalculated and/or get horrible RNG rolls, but based on current intelligence any Vendetta between us is going to be 1) extremely short and 2) extremely funny.

Why has Peter only tried one Praetor Duel? That’s his thing! Too nervous about the single-round nature of it maybe? The Praetor Duel rework does seem to suck a lot – it used to be resolved over multiple rounds, but now it’s just one round of what amounts to rock-paper-scissors. I stole his good Praetor just in case. Still, he can always buy a new one; of all my competition he is the one that worries me the most, because none of my Rituals give me a 100% foolproof way to subvert a Praetor Duel.

Fairly sure Zael has been trying to run a game on me by trying to convince me in PMs that Skippy and Peter were out to get me, but the cost to me is that I fired off my Diplomatic Immunity event card a bit earlier than I otherwise would have to try and head off a potential attack before I was ready for it. I otherwise haven’t expended any additional resources and actions in response to his insidious rumour-spreading, because it doesn’t actually matter if Peter and Skippy are plotting against me or not. They are my biggest obvious threats, and I’m going to need to take them out one way or the other.

I’m trying a novel strategy of never lying in PMs to other players. Because what would be the point? Tom’s the only one with direct experience of what I’m like in games like this but I feel like my reputation precedes me at this point; I’ve lied so much in TWG, Diplomacy, Civilization 4, Alpha Centauri – and yes, Solium Infernum – that people just automatically assume I am lying whenever I say anything, and that goes double for a game where I’m supposed to be a literal backstabbing devil. So I’ll try not doing that for a bit, and see if I can wrongfoot somebody by actually telling the truth for a change. Albeit a truth worded as creatively as possible.

Click here for Part 2

The post Apocalypse Begrudge Tempestuous – Part 1 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Now that we’ve covered the highlights of 2023, here’s the “Everything Else” category. Again, I should state that there’s selection bias at play here: none of these games are lowlights. All of them were good enough that I put in the time required to finish them, and in several cases that was quite a considerable amount of time. These aren’t bad games. Some of them would even get a grudging recommendation from me, if you like what they’re doing. But I don’t think I’ll particularly remember them a year from now, which is the whole reason I’m taking the time to write them up in this post in the first place.

Once again, in no particular order:

Titan Quest Anniversary Edition

I was struck by a weird compulsion to play an ARPG at the start of the year, and since Diablo 4 wasn’t out for another five months I looked through my Steam backlog and found an unlikely candidate: the 17 year-old Titan Quest. I’d never been able to stick with it beyond the opening region of Greece, mostly because the one time I did and made it to the second region of Egypt only to discover that it was exactly the same except all of the enemies were Scarabs instead of Harpies, I promptly quit. This time I stuck with it, but while it’s not a completely lost cause — slaughtering your way through ancient world mythology is a pretty good concept for an ARPG (hell, it works for God of War) and the visuals haven’t aged all that badly for something from the mid-00s — that initial assessment wasn’t wrong, as all four of the original game’s zones were incredibly samey. It’s not exactly helped by the skill system, either, which looks flexible and interesting at first in its potential for mixing and matching, but because of the way skills work in Diablo 2-style ARPGs (you’re never, ever going to want to put just one point into something unless it’s on the way to unlocking something else) you’re extremely disincentivised to experiment by spreading points around, especially when respeccing is so expensive. Also I took all of the minion skills and wound up with a poxy four minions, and I hate ARPGs that do that. Titan Quest is surprisingly playable in 2023 thanks to the Anniversary Edition, but no more than that; it’s probably more fun in co-op, but then most things are. Still, it was good to tick it off my to-do list after 17 years.

Returnal

I really did want to like Returnal. I got on very well with Housemarque’s last game, 2017’s Nex Machina, and by the time the PC version of Returnal rolled out at the start of 2023 it had already been out for a couple of years as one of the earliest PS5 exclusives, where it had done very well for itself. Given that Housemarque were dangerously close to closure prior to Returnal I’m quite happy that they’ve seen enough success with it to ensure some future games from them.

Perhaps not if they’re all like Returnal, though. It’s an adaption of the arcade arena shoot ‘em ups Housemarque were previously known for, except this time the perspective has been changed to third-person, there’s some roguelite elements that have been spliced in because roguelites were all the rage in 2021, and a completely incoherent story that’s trying to channel a Remedy game, but which simply illustrates that Remedy are actually doing a couple of things right because Returnal’s story falls totally flat. The roguelite stuff is pretty standard – you walk into a room, the doors lock, enemies spawn, you kill them, you loot chests containing new weapons that will hopefully define your run, and then you move on to the next room to do it again. The only reason you know it’s a Housemarque game is because the enemies all attack by shooting laser beams or clusters of gigantic slow-moving ball projectiles that you have to dodge between — the exact same stuff that made up their prior shooters, except this time you’re looking at it from ground level.

This is not, on the face of it, a recipe for disaster. I think the roguelite elements of Returnal are profoundly misguided but the basic shooter game could work if it had been handled just a little differently. Unfortunately you need mobility to dodge all of those swarms of angry red projectiles properly, and Returnal doesn’t give you a grappling hook until halfway through the game. This means that the most reliable way to survive is not to dodge, but to hide behind big chunks of rock; yes, unfortunately my first few hours with Returnal did feel distressingly like a sub-par cover shooter. Once I got the grappling hook things perked up considerably, but then Returnal ran into its second big problem: it’s a roguelite, and it seemed to expect that I was going to replay it more than I actually did, except what actually happened was that I died in the first or second areas five times, then I made it all the way to the fifth area (out of six), and then I finished the game. That’s just seven runs with a wildly uneven distribution of content; oh, in order to get the true ending I’d have to do it all again several times, but the story’s not good enough for me to care about that and as far as I can tell I wouldn’t experience meaningfully different levels while doing so. The world design is pretty generic despite some of the bosses being pretty striking, and certainly not worth replaying for its own sake.

And that’s the big irony of Returnal. It’s Housemarque’s shift to roguelites. Roguelites are supposed to be replayable. And yet I got considerably more replay value out of Nex Machina — a classic shoot ‘em up with none of this roguelite shit in it, where the only real pull is going for a high score — than I did Returnal. So even though it appears to have been much more commercially viable than their previous boutique shooters, I can’t help but feel that Returnal is a bit of a misstep for them.

Company of Heroes 3

It’s a real shame that there are so few RTS specialist developers left over from the boom of the 90s and early 00s. It’s even more a shame that one of the last holdouts from that era, Relic Software, has produced such unfailingly mid output over the last decade. Company of Heroes 3 did look for a bit like it was going to buck that trend, blending classic CoH skirmish gameplay with a grand strategy layer where you maneuver the Allied armies during the invasion of Italy. It’s at least refreshing not to do Normandy for the five millionth time, and while the series has never been particularly concerned with historical accuracy there’s a loose restriction to 1943-era tech allowing some less iconic units to take centre stage; this is a battlefield where Matildas and Stuarts are main battle tanks and the Sherman is an end-of-tech tree heavy tank that outguns 90% of the German roster. The RTS gameplay is as solid as ever, helped along by the ever-characterful voice lines from the troops under your command — I’d even go so far as to say this is Relic’s best game since Chaos Rising, although that’s not really saying much given how CoH 2, Dawn of War 3 and Age of Empires 4 all turned out. Unfortunately Company of Heroes 3 came in far too hot with multiplayer that was missing too many key features, a skirmish AI that was much too stupid to be an effective opponent, and a campaign layer that was packed absolutely full of bugs; I think it’s got a lot of potential, but it was a commercial flop and Relic suffered swingeing job cuts shortly afterwards that mean it’s not going to get the level of support it needs to be polished into something that’s unambiguously good. And that’s the biggest shame of all: Relic have finally done something right, but they weren’t given the time or resources to do it right enough¹.

Undead Horde 2: Necropolis

Looking back at it there’s a common theme running through a lot of the games I played in 2023: I clearly had an itch to play a Diablo 2 Necromancer again and so I duly rolled up minion classes in Titan Quest Anniversary, Everspace 2, and Diablo 4. However, since modern ARPG designers are cowards they’ll never let me completely replicate my skeleton armies because of the misguided belief that pushing one of four buttons to make monsters explode is a more engaging experience than watching my minions do it for me. It’s unsurprising, then, that the game that came closest to replicating that experience wasn’t any of the big-name ARPGs, but was instead this indie game whose entire premise was, well, that you are a Diablo 2 Necromancer. In fact since Undead Horde is a full-on strategy game rather than an ARPG it can go rather further with the concept, allowing you to summon sixty or seventy skeletons at once to steamroll the enemy while you support them with spells and buffs. The story is non-existent and the visuals don’t have much character to them, so the exact amount of mileage you get out of it is going to entirely depend on how much you get out of watching an army of blocky skeletons (or zombies, or ghouls, or undead chickens — there’s many monster types available) mash itself into enemy settlements, but I thought it was a perfectly serviceable take on the concept that provided a decent enough distraction for a few hours.

The Last Spell

On the face of it, a really good turn-based tactical strategy game: control a party of up to six heroes to fight off hordes of zombies and flesh monsters at night, while rebuilding your town defences and fine-tuning your heroes’ stats and itemisation during the day. There’s a lot of really interesting decisions to be made around character builds and tradeoffs between plopping down More Ballistas Now or blacksmiths and armourers that will take a while to pay off but which will sustain you into the endgame; there’s good enemy variety in the regular enemy waves that keep you on your toes; the pixel art presentation is really nice (it looks better to play than it does in screenshots); and the soundtrack is an unusual fusion of techno-rock that fits perfectly into what the game is trying to do. Unfortunately despite all of this good work The Last Spell has an absolutely massive flaw: it’s opted for a sort-of roguelike structure where you’re supposed to fail a few times so that you can learn the levels, experiment with hero builds, and build up the meta-progression to make winning easier, except a single run of one of The Last Spell’s levels can take up to fourteen hours. For just one level. I can fit multiple games of Civilization into that! I’ve lost patience with even normal roguelikes that ask me to invest a few hours into a run because I only have so much time remaining on this earth and if you’re going to test my build against a selection of final bosses that are rock-hard (and also not all that well tuned) you’d better be asking me to throw away less than an hour of my time. The only reason I made it as far into The Last Spell as I did is because I never actually lost until the final level, at which point I quit and never looked back because I couldn’t face doing that again.

Everspace 2

Often referred to as Diablo in a spaceship, I think Everspace 2 has inherited a few too many design ideas from Ubisoft open-world games. To me, it has two major selling points: first is that the one thing it unarguably does bring across from Diablo is that each different ship corresponds to a specific RPG character class and one of them is the Necromancer, and I had great fun siccing hordes of drones on my enemies before blowing them out of the sky with a flak cannon while they were distracted. Second is that it looks a lot like Freelancer, and its implementation of the ship controls is a logical, modernised continuation of what Freelancer pioneered with its mouse-and-keyboard setup (except with gamepad options if you really want, although I didn’t because it felt weirdly unplayable that way). You could take the basic setup of Everspace 2 and make a very good Freelancer sequel with it. Sadly this is Everspace 2, not Freelancer 2, and so instead we get a generic, static universe filled with a collection of sixty-second random events and the ubiquitous question mark symbols infesting the map. There were some side mission chains that had had more effort put into them than I expected given that obvious design objective, but the worst thing that I can say about Everspace 2 is that it’s otherwise totally unremarkable once you understand what it really is. You’ll probably have a good time if you pick it up knowing that you’re in for a space version of Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed (and to be completely fair to Everspace 2 it’s doing it better than Ubisoft themselves managed these days as it’s a far better implementation of the concept than bloody Valhalla), but if you go into it expecting Freelancer 2 — or even Diablo in space — you’re going to end up sorely disappointed.

Dead Space

A successful remake of the original Dead Space, in that I actually finished it this time; it modernises and improves without compromising on the spirit of the original game. For better or worse it’s still Dead Space, with everything that implies: in the “better” column we have the exploration of the environment, the great zero-G sections and the absolutely hysterical dismemberment system (exactly why sawing off a foot kills the necromorphs when repeatedly blowing off their head does nothing is, alas, never explained); while the “worse” one has boss fights that feel like they’ve been ripped directly from the 2007 original with no modernisation, an also 2007-appropriate number of cutscenes where characters talk to Isaac from behind unbreakable glass windows, and having the same encounter copy-pasted throughout the game where you pick up a key item and the lights go out and it spawns two necromorphs in front of you and one behind you. The gameplay improvements are mostly subtle enough that they go largely unnoticed except for the whole thing feeling much better to play this time around, with the one exception being an increasingly-annoying tic of modern AAA gaming: Isaac talks now, and it’s pretty much just so that he can look at a door that’s shutting way too fast for him to get through and say “hmmm, maybe I should use stasis on that door…” I’m all for making games more accessible, but I’m not sure what the point is in putting a puzzle into a game when you’re outright telling the player what they should do to solve it. Still, this Dead Space remake is solid and competent, which are not the worst adjectives I’ve ever used to describe a Dead Space game, so it did something right.

Resident Evil 4

Given that I hated the original Resident Evil 4 it’s a pleasant surprise to me that I liked the Resident Evil 4 remake as much as I did. I’ve had twenty years to accept that the later Resident Evils are silly action shooters where you blast zombies rather than tense resource management games where you try to avoid them, and Resident Evil 4 has had a lot more time and resources put into it than the similarly action-oriented Resident Evil 3 remake. Combat encounters are much better-designed, gunfeel and enemy damage feedback are far more satisfying, and the bossfights.. are there, I guess (there’s not really any chance of making a bossfight in a third-person shooter that I’ll actually enjoy). Crucially there is still a bit of resource management to think about in Resi 4 in the form of your ongoing search for money to upgrade your weapons so that you can dispatch zombies more efficiently; you might have enough bullets, but you’ll never have enough pesos to buy everything you want. This propped the game up admirably during its slower sections, and I also have immense respect for the developers for putting a rocket launcher in the game, telling me it will one-shot any enemy that it’s used on, and sticking to that promise when I chose to use it on the final boss. It’s still a long way off of the brilliance of the first two Resident Evil games — it’s a theme park ride instead of a haunted house, which I will never see as anything other than a sad downgrade for the series that did so much to establish the survival horror genre — but for the first time ever I can see that Resident Evil 4 is pretty enjoyable in its own way.

Like a Dragon: Ishin!

I’ve established a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Yakuza series. I loved Yakuza 0 and still think it’s one of the best games of the last console generation. I was broadly ambivalent about Yakuza 2, as this introduced me to the reality that nearly all of these games are basically the same, just with increasingly stupid storylines. The Western rebrand into Like a Dragon (which would otherwise have been called Yakuza 7) briefly sparked my interest again, as it showed that the series could function adequately in a different genre and without its central protagonist, Kiryu Kazama. And then I played Like a Dragon: Ishin!, which is not the worst game I played in 2023, but which instead lays a very strong claim to being the most boring one. It’s a standalone story that takes place in late 19th century Kyoto, and this is a huge downgrade from the bright lights and arcade sounds of the modern-day Kamorocho district. All of the characters are 19th century versions of characters from the mainline series, except there’s five or six games’ worth of characters stuffed into Ishin and nobody gets anywhere near enough screentime — and to make matters worse they re-use some of the boss music from 0, so when you fight the Awano analogue and With Vengeance kicks in it has absolutely none of the emotional buildup Awano got in 0 and feels completely unearned. As usual there’s about ten thousand minigames to distract you, but Ishin takes it further by making one of them — the stupid repetitive roguelike dungeon one — key to levelling up and progressing your character. (Who is a version of Kiryu that has way less of the signature wry humour to him — also this one most definitely does kill people.) The game in general has much less of a sense of humour than the previous Yakuza games, instead preferring to lean into the tortuous political wrangling of the main storyline — and that’s the thing Yakuza has never done well, even in 0. Usually the series has a great sense of how to build a storyline and its characters to an emotional crescendo, but I could not give the tiniest iota of a shit about the actual details of the plot, so when Ishin decides to put that front and centre over and above its character work it’s no wonder I ended up bored out of my mind..

Diablo 4

“Reactionary” is a fun word. When I think of reactions, I think of chemical reactions, and so when I first came across “reactionary” I thought it carried a sense of dynamism and liveliness, the kind of thing you’d get if you dropped a bar of magnesium into a beaker of water and stepped back to watch the fireworks. It was several years before I learned that what “reactionary” actually means, when used in a social or political context, is someone or something that desperately wants to push back against progress and return to the status quo ante of how things were when they were younger and had more hair — basically this classic Abe Simpson moment, but with zero self-awareness.

Still, while “reactionary” might be an unnecessarily confusing term it’s a very useful one for describing Diablo 4, which is in some ways one of the most reactionary games I’ve ever played. You might remember Diablo 3 copping a hell of a lot of criticism after its initial gameplay reveal for daring to include actual colours in a franchise that was previously known for endless spelunking through gothic, moody dungeons. Diablo 3 might have sold 37 million copies, but it’s clear that that criticism is still very much on Blizzard’s mind 11 years later because it’s the only thing that explains Diablo 4’s visuals, which are a murky, desaturated mess. There is nothing about its world, or its visual design, that is remotely appealing; I don’t get excited about exploring a pitch-black dungeon where a collection of the most generic monsters on the planet lurch out of the darkness to be slaughtered, and then teleporting back to a small collection of washed-out mud huts to sell the loot — and yet this is inexplicably the core loop of Diablo 4. I perhaps would have enjoyed it more if, I don’t know, I could actually see what was going on. I also perhaps would have enjoyed it more if the skill system didn’t feel utterly parsimonious — it is possible to make very OP builds if you understand it, but the up-front offering is that each skill point invested gets you a 3% increase in damage, or something similar. The big innovation of a permanently online, shared world where you see other players running around adds almost nothing to the experience aside from occasionally catching a glimpse of BonerLord666 hurrying to their next dungeon, and the only bright spot was that the combat felt more kinetic than I was expecting given how regressive the rest of the core ARPG experience was. It’s not like Diablo 3 launched in a perfect state either, but at least there I didn’t fundamentally disagree with the core game and visual design; there’s too many decisions made that are fundamentally, well, reactionary, driven by a yearning for the good old days of Diablo 2, and which are now baked into Diablo 4’s structure in a way that’s going to be very difficult (if not impossible) to undo. I wasn’t expecting anything special from Diablo 4 and it’s not exactly a bad game, but it is still a very disappointing one.

To The Core

To The Core is a bit of an oddity. It’s a clicker game that is not a clicker; an idle game where you can’t be idle; driven by the same core concept of Number Go Up but which demands some active thought on the part of the player. You’re put in control of a drill and dropped onto a planet, and your objective is to drill out as much of the crust, mantle and — eventually — the core in order to gather materials to fuel your metagame upgrades. Smashing your drill into the planet surface at high speed depletes your health, so you need those upgrades to drill through tougher materials while taking less damage, and those tougher materials are used to buy more upgrades, which let you drill through even tougher materials etc. etc. There’s a fun power curve where you start the game barely able to drill through a few metres of crust before exploding, and you end it by making an entire planet disappear in just a few seconds; I don’t think the metagame upgrades are particularly well set up, but the drilling is undeniably satisfying and kept me going for the 7-odd hours it took to get me to the end. Unfortunately To The Core is seriously let down by performance issues as the planets get bigger and the number of particle effects and exploding blocks increases at a geometric rate, and the final level tested my patience more than any other game this year as I had to control a slideshow where I was precariously balancing my drill above the surface of a black hole for upwards of fifteen minutes. I think that with a bit more polish in both the metagame design and the performance To The Core would be an unambiguous recommend for people who like clickers, or idle games, or autoshooters; in its current state it’s more difficult to do so, but I can’t deny I got a good few hours of fun out of it.

Dredge

This one was a bit of a disappointment, as I played it just before Christmas after hearing good word of mouth and seeing it appear on several GOTY lists. Imagine my surprise, then, upon discovering that Dredge is simply… fine. It’s at least a bit more focused compared to the other fishing game making regular appearances on GOTY lists this year, but it’s also much more joyless and mechanical about the act of exploring the ocean and finding new and interesting places to fish — perhaps understandable, seeing as it’s buttressing its fishing minigame with a Lovecraftian horror plot that means it can’t make the waters too welcoming, but underwhelming nevertheless. You do a circuit of the cliff island, then the lagoon island, then the swamp island, then the volcano island, completing a fishing quest in each one to progress the paper-thin story, and then the game ends. Indeed, if not for the requirement to grind fish to upgrade your boat to catch more advanced types of fish I think Dredge would be about two hours long. This core loop is compelling enough and there’s enough detail packed into the environments to give exploring a bit of a pull, and the presentation is adequately charming; the spookier elements strike me as profoundly misjudged, though, especially since nothing bad can actually happen to you just so long as you aren’t stupid enough to be out on the open ocean after midnight, and so despite its admirable focus in comparison to Dave the Diver it’s Dredge that ends up feeling like the shallower game.

 (the) Gnorp Apologue

I was quite taken with Gnorp at first. It’s yet another idle game, with exponentially increasing numbers and the concept of prestiging baked into the game’s core — where you reset all of your hard-won progress in exchange for permanent metagame upgrades that make the next run easier — but Gnorp at least appeared to introduce two interesting innovations to the formula. First is that it deigns to surround the otherwise shallow Number Go Up gameplay with some actually pretty great set dressing; you’re in control of a settlement of little circular creatures called Gnorps who are obsessed with smashing a rock, and every single upgrade that you buy produces some tangible rock-smashing effect in that settlement. Housing appears and spawns more Gnorps, who can then be gainfully employed in a number of professions to pound the rock to bits. Bombers jet up above it and piledrive it from above; Gunners wander into the Gun Shop and are handed rifles — or a gatling gun — to blast it to smithereens; all while Runners scurry back and forth to hurl the chunks into your stash so that you can use them to buy more upgrades. Every upgrade having a dedicated piece of pixel art with accompanying detailed animations as the Gnorps hurl themselves at the rock makes for a much more charming presentation than most idle games. In terms of gameplay it initially seemed like Gnorp had innovated there too, as the prestige points you can spend open the door to some interesting synergies between different Gnorp professions and the potential for different builds to optimise your rock smashing. Unfortunately this ended up being a bit of a false promise, as while there’s different synergies available I think there’s only one that’s capable of finishing the game (it’s the one that involves spamming rockets), and Gnorp’s failure to offer multiple viable builds makes it once-through-and-done — I still prefer that over idle games that spiral into infinity hours, but it’s a bit of a missed opportunity in terms of replayability.

The Talos Principle 2

The generous way of looking at Talos Principle 2 is that it didn’t annoy me quite as much as it could have. That’s actually saying quite a lot considering that I loudly swore at my monitor when I saw the announcement trailer for it; the first Talos Principle is a great puzzle game with surprisingly on-point delivery of its philosophical storyline, and one of the most powerfully satisfying endings in videogames. And that’s why the very concept of Talos Principle 2 pissed me off, because the first game stood alone very nicely and there was absolutely nothing a sequel could do, story-wise, that could possibly be better than the open-ended sense of possibility left by its predecessor. Unfortunately those fears did ultimately turn out to be well-founded, as both the story and the storytelling in Talos Principle 2 are much more in the vein of a Generic Videogame Plot — a not-particularly-coherent excuse for the puzzles, where your silent protagonist is constantly suffering the indignity of having people call them on the telephone so that they can desperately attempt to explain why what you’re doing is important, and which ultimately ends up being so much sci-fi codswallop².

Now, in Talos Principle 2’s favour I did initially enjoy the puzzles; I think Talos Principle’s mix of line-of-sight, positioning and sequencing puzzles are the best that any of these first-person puzzle games have come up with, and the sequel does at least continue that trend. I had a great time during the first half of the game just buzzsawing through puzzle after puzzle, with none of them taking more than 5 minutes and most of them taking less than 60 seconds. It was in the second half of the game that I started to get slightly uneasy, though, as the puzzle complexity just didn’t ratchet up at all despite the new gimmick to be found in each area that’s supposed to mix things up a bit and keep you on your intellectual toes. Usually when you walk into a puzzle room there will be an obvious solution that’s apparent after a few seconds of looking at the layout, and the surprising (and underwhelming) thing about Talos Principle 2 is that the obvious solution is almost always the actual solution, and it just takes a bit of fine-tuning to get the sequencing right. The satisfying thing about a puzzle game for me is when I can eventually make connections that aren’t immediately obvious, when I’m being pushed to actually think about something for a bit, and then when I figure it out I feel very smart. Talos Principle 2 doesn’t do this for me at all, preferring to try and stun the player with quantity of puzzles (it’s nearly twice as long as the first game) where I think it would have done far better to focus on quality. It’s still a cut above most first-person puzzlers and comfortably in the upper 50% of games I played this year, but when you’re following up a stone cold classic like The Talos Principle — a game that really did not need a sequel — I don’t think it’s enough to be simply “okay”.

Dave the Diver

I bought Dave the Diver pretty much sight unseen because it turns out I’m just as susceptible to advertising as anyone; I saw a very attractive full-page banner on the Steam store homepage promising endless blue oceans filled with charming pixel art fish and slammed the Buy button pretty much as fast as I could. And to its considerable credit Dave the Diver’s core loop does live up to that promise; the idea is that you catch fish via the surprisingly visceral methods of harpooning them, shooting them, stabbing them, or blowing them up with a grenade launcher, and you load up your inventory with as much fish as your portly diver avatar can physically carry. Once you return to the surface you use the fish to make dishes for a Diner Dash-style sushi restaurant minigame, and while I don’t think this part of the game is particularly well-executed it’s done competently enough to provide the other half of the loop; you catch basic fish to sell in the restaurant for money, which you use to upgrade your diving equipment so that you can dive deeper and catch more advanced fish to sell in the restaurant for more money.

Ill-advised QTEs aside, Dave the Diver’s fishing segment is truly exceptional, a rare example of something being delivered almost exactly as advertised, and I can see why it’s made a lot of people’s GOTY lists. It would have made mine if the game were just the fishing and the sushi restaurant bits, but sadly Dave the Diver turned out to be one of the most unfocused games I’ve played this year, instead choosing to tie the player up in a whole host of throwaway minigames that aren’t anything to do with the fishing. There’s stealth segments that pay homage to Metal Gear Solid, a Guitar Hero-esque rhythm game, a farming minigame, a seahorse racing minigame, a shoot ‘em up segment, and probably half a dozen others that I’ve forgotten because they’re so disposable — but all of them substantially diminish the experience because the entire time I was stuck in one of these minigames I was just wanting to get back to the fishing, and I ended up resenting Dave the Diver for repeatedly wasting my time. The problem isn’t so much that these distractions are necessary because Dave the Diver doesn’t have confidence in itself, but rather that it has far too much confidence in itself to add these minigames where most other dev teams would drop them for lack of resources — this certainly doesn’t strike me as a dev team where anyone was shouting the magic word “NO!” whenever one of these things came up — and so the game ends up feeling bloated, overindulgent, and overall a bit of a mess.

Freelancer

Freelancer is a fascinating glimpse into what might have been for the space sim genre. It’s very fondly thought of by those who played it at the time of its release, who it turns out are the only people who have played it legally since it’s not available on any digital distribution platform. (I do have a Freelancer disc somewhere but I no longer have a disc drive to put it in – fortunately the ISO is readily available with a simple Google search and the game works almost flawlessly on Windows 10.) Twenty years is more than enough time for nostalgia to work its heady magic, though, and the reality of Freelancer in 2023 is more than a little bit… mixed.

Freelancer is best thought as two games in one. One is the multiplayer version played on a persistent server, where you have a sandbox environment to explore, trade and fight your way up from Space Bum to Space Ace. Apparently it’s very good, and it’s where a lot of that nostalgic reminiscing comes from. Unfortunately for me, I’ve never played it; I’ve been stuck with the single-player story campaign, where you can see a few scattered parts of the multiplayer sandbox gameplay — like pirate stations not being marked on the map, but still being able to figure out where they are based on where pirate attacks take place — but you have much less freedom to explore. You’re railroaded from one region of the galaxy to another as the plot demands, with jump gates being locked until you’ve progressed the story far enough, and each region offers just three ship models: light fighter, heavy fighter, and cargo freighter. Freelancer is supposed to be a freeform space game like Elite where you take jobs to upgrade your ship and equipment so that you can take on more valuable jobs, but here you just grind freelance missions until you get the next variant of the model of ship that you’re flying, and then you do the plot missions, and then you move on to the next galactic region to do it all again. There’s some fun voice casting and the universe being split into regions based on national and cultural stereotypes is taken to such batshit extremes here it’s actually brilliant (the very idea of the UK having a galactic space empire is utterly bonkers), but Freelancer had serious problems during its development and the story becomes increasingly threadbare the further you get with it. No, it’s got some interesting ideas but I don’t think I could recommend Freelancer for its straitjacketed single player campaign.

The interesting part of Freelancer, though, is the control scheme. Up until Freelancer space sims had all been controlled via first-person view from the spacecraft cockpit, with one hand on the keyboard and the other clutching a joystick. Oh, you could try to play them with a mouse, and in fact that’s how I played TIE Fighter back in the day, but tight turns would require you to pick up and drop your mouse multiple times as you repeatedly swept it across your mouse mat to try and get a bead on your target. This was hardly ideal, especially considering that every single computer on the planet came with a mouse but a joystick was something you had to specifically had to buy. Freelancer is the first — and as it turns out, only — space sim from that period to try to address that problem by marketing itself to mouse-users first and foremost. The game is controlled via third-person perspective, and moving the mouse rotates the camera around your spacecraft. Holding the left mouse button down, though, locks your view forward; moving the mouse in this state makes a big arrow appear on the HUD in the direction that you moved it, and your ship will start to turn. The further the arrow is from the centre of the HUD, the faster your turn rate, and once you have it at the edge of the screen you’re turning as fast as possible and you don’t need to move the mouse any more.

Coming to it in 2023, I was struck by how natural this control scheme felt. It’s easy and intuitive and feels a hell of a lot like the modern gamepad controls used in arcade space shooters today — except Freelancer was doing it in 2003, with a mouse. Digital Anvil might have had problems with development but they were thinking years ahead of everyone else and Freelancer should have been a genre-defining game, one of those rare titles that does something so groundbreaking that everyone else scrambles to copy it. Unfortunately Freelancer was released a year or two after the death of the space sim genre as a whole, and so there was little left to define, and certainly no scope to follow up with a more polished sequel; thus Freelancer is doomed to “historical curio” status instead of the revolutionary space sim it could have been

Stronghold: Definitive Edition

It’s Stronghold.

No, really. It’s an attempt to give Stronghold the same kind of makeover that Age of Empires 2 got with its Definitive Edition a few years ago: it’s the same game, but with redone music, re-recorded voices and unit and building animations that have all been updated to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second. Which is all fine and welcome — Stronghold has always been presentationally very strong, and these updates enhance the best part of the game — but the problem is that the Definitive Edition does precisely sod all about Stronghold’s dodgy balancing and (surprisingly) several persistent bugs around common interactions like unit selection. So every defensive map is still winnable by walling off the enemy spawn points with towers full of archers and/or crossbowmen, and it’s only the offensive maps that pose a challenge as you try and figure out how to use your limited troops to crack the enemy castle.  Even here it’s not a particularly satisfying challenge, as I spent far more time trying to work around the terrible and/or buggy unit pathfinding and targeting than I did strategising. The Definitive Edition is a fun blast from the past, to start with, but the more time I spent with it the more I remembered why I’d never bothered to finish Stronghold’s single player campaign when I first played it back in 2004.

Age of Wonders 4

I’ve been pondering  it on and off for the last 8 months, and I think I’ve finally figured out why Age of Wonders 4 didn’t really land with me. What I’ve historically liked about the Age of Wonders series has been the more RPG-esque aspects of the gameplay — role-playing as an evil wizard blighting the world with death magic and sending forth skeleton hordes to exterminate the living, that kind of thing. I liked playing up to a race’s theme. I don’t think they’re particularly good 4X games from an empire-building point of view, it’s the blend of 4X with recruitable heroes and magic spells (and maybe some might scattered around in there for good measure) that makes the series special.

And this is a problem for Age of Wonders 4, because its big innovation is that it no longer has discrete races; instead you customise whatever race and trait combination you want at the start of the game (so you can have angelic orcs or demon halfings or whatever) and while you select a sphere of magic during race creation you’re not limited to it during the game; in fact you can (and I did) research every single spell book available if you have the time and the inclination. In theory this means that if I want my skeleton hordes I just make some undead humans and stick to Death magic, but the tradeoff for every race being potentially able to do everything is that the choices that you do make feel much less meaningful. Most of the games I played — especially the ones which went into the lategame — felt pretty similar, as I first filled out the spellbook for the sphere of magic I’d selected to start with and then branched out into the ones I’d already tried in other games. It’s weirdly bland and amorphous and feels less amenable to that role-playing I liked so much, and the weak 4X gameplay on its own just isn’t enough to keep my attention. I did have one good game which had a bit of a story to it, on a map where all factions are stuck in a permanent hellwar and I had to stall enemies on one flank with hordes of summoned copper golems while desperately trying to mop up on the other before everything collapsed, but after I’d played four games I felt like there wasn’t all that much left to see and dropped Age of Wonders 4 entirely. Which, for a game that supposedly offers infinite variety, is a bit of a failure.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

An adaptation of the tabletop Rogue Trader RPG ruleset handled by Owlcat. Owlcat made Wrath of the Righteous, which is one of the best RPGs to come out in recent years in spite of all of the bugs, and so I was looking forward to their take on Rogue Trader. But I couldn’t get over a niggling worry I had, especially once the release date was announced: Wrath came out in September 2021, and Rogue Trader came out in December 2023. That’s just over two years to develop a full fat RPG, and Owlcat are not a large studio, and they already have a problem with biting off more than they can chew in terms of scope. (Which is why their games ship with so many bugs.)

Sadly my fears were well-founded: Rogue Trader is a 70-hour RPG, that should be a 40-hour RPG, and which feels like a 40-hour RPG that’s been stretched into 70 hours. Owlcat do their best, with their customary branching paths for the narrative — less ambitious than what you could do in Wrath, but that game had paths that let you literally rewrite reality so that’s unsurprising — and a decent stab at trying to take the Rogue Trader rules and turn them into a half-decent tactical strategy segment. Party combat is kinetic and visceral, while the ship-to-ship void combat minigame is the least insufferable minigame they’ve come up with so far — not particularly deep, but it feels right and I was never displeased to see a void combat encounter pop up. Most importantly, Rogue Trader is only the second 40K game that’s halfway sold me on 40K as a universe; it makes a valiant attempt to grasp the ridiculous scale of the setting in the same way as Battlefleet Gothic 2 did a few years back, instead of using it as window dressing for smashing increasingly colourless armies into one another.

That attempt at scale repeatedly runs up against the reality of Rogue Trader, though, which is that this was a game made on a limited budget and a limited timescale and so in order to have a hundred locations in the game they’ve all been made roughly the size of a shoebox. You visit the governor’s palace on one of your capital worlds and there’s a grand total of two people to talk to, and nothing else to do once you’ve looted the half-dozen containers scattered about the place. If there’s a door that you can open there won’t be a door-opening animation; the screen will cut to black for a second, and then when it comes back the door will be magically open. Most locations don’t even go that far; there’ll just be a rocky pit containing one combat encounter and that’s it. Even when the game does throw a larger environment at you as part of the plot, all it can fill that environment with is enemies and traps (I really hope you like clicking on red squares to disarm traps, because you’re going to be doing it a lot in Rogue Trader). In terms of exploration, Rogue Trader is one of the least interactive RPGs I’ve ever played; in fact it reminded me an awful lot of Tyranny, which was another RPG made on a shoestring budget and which showed it to an almost painful degree.

Couple that with the customary bugs and lack of polish — in particular the UI is an absolute car crash at every turn, which is surprising considering Owlcat had done a pretty good job with their UI and tooltips for their Pathfinder games — and it means Rogue Trader has a much harder job winning my respect. In Kingmaker and Wrath I was excited to explore, to progress quest chains and see what new parts of the map had to offer me, whereas in Rogue Trader I know what the next planet will have on it: a knife-fight inside a cupboard. If you like 40K and you’re curious then I’d say it’s worth a look in a year once they’ve fixed the worst of the bugs, but if you don’t have a particular attachment to the setting then I think you can do better things with your time.

The post 2023 Games Roundup: The Rest appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I mostly took a break from writing about games in 2023. This was only supposed to be for a few months but rapidly snowballed due to a combination of personal reasons and me feeling a bit burned out on the whole “video games” thing. It’s not that I wasn’t playing them, just that I was struggling to find the motivation to write about them – and this made me a bit suspicious that 11 years of doing this blog had made me lose sight of what I enjoyed about them in the first place. I’ve gotten into the habit of mentally composing a review in the back of my head whenever I play something new, and it’s a bit hard to have fun with a game when my brain is constantly in critique mode. So I thought I’d try not doing that for a bit.

Did it work? I’m honestly not sure. I am going to try to write more in 2024, but it’ll probably be fewer reviews and more directed exploration of something specific, like the Lucasarts series I did a couple of years back. For now, though, I need to address the same problem I had last year: the reason I’ve managed to keep this blog going for over a decade is because it functions as a personal record of what I thought about games that I happen to have made generally visible, and I don’t like the idea of 2023 being a void where that’s concerned. So, here’s the customary roundup of the games I played in 2023. Slightly different rules to previous years; first is that because I only did one normal review I don’t have the time or the space to write about everything I played, so this is a summary of only the games I completed (or very close to it). Second is that because I wasn’t pushing myself to carry on playing games I wasn’t enjoying I tended to drop bad games before finishing them, so this list does have a bit of a selection bias to it — and because there’s less of a spectrum of quality it doesn’t make sense to do the four category split I did in 2021 and 2022. This time there’s just two: the Best games I completed in 2023 (and which I’d be happy to recommend to other people), and then the Rest of them, which are mostly decent but which have significant problems that meant I came away from them with a more mixed opinion.

I’ll put The Rest into a separate post. For now, let’s start with The Best, in no particular order:

Jagged Alliance 3

Jagged Alliance 3 was the most obviously-doomed release of the year. There have been no less than three prior attempts to resurrect the Jagged Alliance series over the last ten years and every single one of them has crashed and burned — not only that, but developers Haemimont deliberately took aim at these failures in one of their pre-release trailers and said that this time, finally, somebody would make a proper followup to Jagged Alliance 2. You could have filed that trailer under the dictionary definition of “hubris”, and by all rights Jagged Alliance 3 should have joined Back in Action, Flashback and Rage! on top of that pile of rejects.

Imagine my surprise, then, on discovering that Jagged Alliance 3 is actually pretty damn good. It suffers from some lumpy design and a release version that wasn’t exactly high on polish, but it’s still easily the most fun I’ve had with a tactical strategy game since… oh, probably 2018’s Battletech. It’s got all of the Jagged Alliance bits: wisecracking mercenaries, tinpot dictators, a strategic map where you take over mines to get money and train militia to defend them, and a really interesting take on the tactical combat segment that acknowledges the last 25 years of progress in the genre while retaining enough classic Jagged Alliance elements (like investing additional AP to increase your chances of a shot landing) that it still felt like Jagged Alliance. It even makes some interesting design choices around balancing the game via ammo scarcity — belt-fed machineguns are horrifically powerful, but you’ll easily exhaust your entire supply of ammo for them in a single engagement so you have to carefully pick which fights to use them in — and much of your mercs’ combat power being locked up in their heavily-customised weapons rather than their stats, which I’m not sure I fully agreed with given how it shifts the focus of the game, but which I found engaging nonetheless. The mercenaries themselves are all stereotypes of 90s action movie characters that absolutely shouldn’t work, the joke should get old approximately ten minutes into the 40-hour campaign, but somehow it never does and I grew very attached to my main squad of six. And the music is absolutely phenomenal in places. Yes, I have to admit that Jagged Alliance 3 somehow beat the odds; it’s not perfect by any means, but then neither was Jagged Alliance 2 and it does more than enough right that it’s the first game in twenty-five years that can be considered a worthy successor.

Chained Echoes

“JRPG” is a bit of a loaded term these days, one which carries a hint of Western supercilicism about it and which Japanese devs are a bit nonplussed by, so I’ll try and stay away from it when describing Chained Echoes. It’s going to be difficult, though, because Chained Echoes is very much a love letter to Square’s SNES-era RPGs, including classic titles like Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. Actually that’s probably being a bit too kind, as Chained Echoes stumbles over the line separating “loving tribute” from “shameless ripoff” several times, and mixes it in with all of your favourite animes plus some incredibly juvenile writing — hey, what if the translation team for FF6 had been able to use the word “Shitface”? Chained Echoes answers that question, and I cringed extremely hard several times when playing it, but I kept playing for two reasons. One is that in terms of visuals and sound Chained Echoes is genuinely quite impressive, preserving enough of the look and feel of those classic SNES games to tickle the nostalgia centres in my brain. The other is that Chained Echoes goes to great lengths to eliminate nearly every single one of the major painpoints typically encountered in a JR… in one of those games. Combat has a fast mode. Your party heals to full at the end of every fight. There’s no random encounters (although there are unavoidable ones). There’s an interesting Overdrive system that stops you from spamming the same spells over and over in combat, Combat in general is about intelligently stacking buffs on your party and debuffs on the enemy and then hitting them really, really hard, not just autoattacking them to death. Couple that with an expansive world that’s packed full of secrets and there’s more than enough here to hold the attention of anyone who has fond memories of Square before they became Square-Enix.

Brotato

Yes, at first glance Brotato appears to be just another Vampire Survivors-style autoshooter to throw on top of the pile. It even looks to be more limited than Vampire Survivors at first, with only one level filled with the same set of 7-8 enemy types that are all coloured purple, and no metaprogression to speak of aside from unlocking new character archetypes. However, these limitations are the result of Brotato actually daring to innovate in the genre; the reason there’s only one level is because a run of Brotato is split into 20 rounds, and at the end of the round you get to spend the cash you’ve picked up from killing enemies on new weapons and stat-boosting items for your character so that they can kill even more enemies in the next round. And good lord are there a lot of weapons, items and stats to play with in Brotato; the reason there’s no metaprogression is because Brotato is almost unique amongst autoshooters in having enough mechanical breadth to experiment with different builds within the space of a single run. Maybe you go heavy on landmines and turrets and explosive damage. Maybe you get six SMGs and rely on the fire rate to heal you through lifesteal. Maybe you pick a bunch of currency-boosting items early on in the hope that you can stay alive long enough to make the investment pay off in later rounds. Maybe you just ignore weapons completely and concentrate instead on making yourself so tanky that you’re literally unkillable — this is a viable tactic since killing bosses is not required and you just need to outlast the timer on every round to complete the run. The high granularity of the different weapons and stats offers a refreshing amount of variety and flexibility compared to the Vampire Survivors approach, which is usually about trying to get the same 3-4 god-tier weapons over and over again. Brotato is far from an endless game despite this, with a lifespan that expires shortly after you’ve completed the game once with each character archetype — but there’s about 50 of those so it’ll take a couple of dozen hours, making Brotato excellent value for its £4 pricetag.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I should probably be paying more attention to my Switch. I only pick it up once every couple of years whenever a big tentpole Nintendo release comes along, but nearly every single game I buy from them reminds me that they exist on an entirely different planet from the rest of the industry. This has its good and bad sides; their social features have apparently been designed by a literal alien, for example, but then the actual games tend to bring a totally fresh perspective to genres that I thought had run out of ideas years ago. Breath of the Wild should have redefined the open world RPG back in 2017 with its completely open approach to exploration in a world stuffed full of secrets, but the only lesson the rest of the industry really learned from it was “climbing… good?” And even that got rowed back on a few years later.

I expect Tears of the Kingdom will have even less of an impact than Breath of the Wild. This despite it having not one, not two, but three groundbreaking mechanics that other devs would build an entire game around — but in Tears they’re just stuff you do in the course of another massive and open adventure that’s literally Breath of the Wild Redux. You’ve got Ultrahand, which somebody did make an entire game around (it’s called Garry’s Mod); Fuse, which lets you stick anything in your inventory to anything else in your inventory to come up with new weapons on the fly — stick a Keese eyeball to an arrow to get a homing arrow, or a bomb to a hammer to give it some explosive punch, or even just a long stick to a long stick to create an even longer stick — and the game’s crowning achievement: Recall, which allows localised time manipulation and which is breathtaking in its ambition and execution and completely changes how you approach most of the game’s puzzles. It’s not all hits; the vehicle-building which features in a lot of the viral videos of Tears feels more like an optional extra (albeit an unusually polished and fully-featured one) as it’s not baked into the core gameplay the way Ultrahand, Fuse and Recall are, but I think three impossible mechanics before breakfast is more than enough for any developer.

And that’s precisely Tears’s problem. In order to learn from Breath, other developers would have needed to completely change how they approached world design. They didn’t. Learning from Tears is an even bigger ask; I can’t think of many developers out there who would be technically and temperamentally capable of implementing something with the game-breaking scope of the Recall mechanic, purely because of the vast difference in design mentality between Tears and Breath and every other open world RPG. Other open world games are increasingly made according to a set formula and lean on heavily-scripted set-pieces to liven things up in between robotically clearing the map of points of interest, whereas Nintendo’s approach is to hand the player a set of tools and set them loose in a vast world with very few guardrails to constrain them, because they’re all about experimentation. They’re all about play. Tears might be an example of them trying to do slightly too much in that regard; between Ultrahand, Fuse, Recall, the vehicle building, and separate underground and sky biomes to explore in addition to a remixed version of the Breath of the Wild map, the amount of things that you can do in Tears can feel overwhelming at times, and at others the game feels distinctly bloated. For all of its technical excellence it’s less focused than Breath was and I occasionally missed the comparatively clean simplicity of Breath’s gameplay, but that was only brief snatches of wistfulness in between being completely floored by Tears’s imagination. It’s far from the best Zelda game (it ranks at number four out of the eight that I’ve played) but I’m damned if I didn’t admire its ambition, its inventiveness and its commitment to fun.

Pizza Tower

If you watch the release trailer for Pizza Tower it’s likely you’ll have the same initial reaction I did: it looks like this hilariously overtuned, bastard hard platformer in the vein of Super Meat Boy, and I suspect the reason there’s not more buzz about the game during this GOTY season is because that first impression put a lot of people off of trying it. It certainly put me off trying it; I even refunded the thing on Steam for a month after discovering that the default controls for the maniac pizza chef Peppino are incredibly clunky. Fortunately Pizza Tower is yet another 2023 game with a brilliant soundtrack¹ which tempted me back for a second go, and after I changed the controls to a scheme I could live with I discovered a game that’s actually incredibly forgiving. The objective of each level of Pizza Tower is to get to the end of the level and then run back out again. That’s it. Peppino has no health bar; when enemies hit Peppino, he doesn’t lose health, he loses score. Peppino has effectively infinite lives; when he falls into a bottomless pit he respawns right next to it. There is only one way to lose the level, and that’s by running out of time on the escape run — and that timer doesn’t start until you destroy the support pillar at the end of the level, and it’s very generous if all you’re trying to do is get back to the exit.

But there’s a reason for that. Making it to the end with a few collectibles is all you need to do if you want to progress in Pizza Tower and finish the game, and most levels are easily completable on the very first attempt. If you want to get an actually high score, though, you need to first do the normal escape run, and then when you get back to the level exit ignore it completely and instead go through the secret portal that takes you all the way back to the start of the escape run to do it all over again. This gives you a whole load of bonus points but does not add any time onto the timer, which continues to steadily tick down, so what Pizza Tower effectively does here is give you the choice of Double Or Nothing. To get the highest score, the P-Rank, you have to pick up every collectible, find every secret, kill almost every enemy, only get hit once or twice (more than that will break your combo multiplier), and do the end run twice against that merciless timer. Unbelievably there is still room for very minor errors here, if you have the nerves of steel required to recover from them; Pizza Tower does not demand perfection for the highest scores, just very close to it. But it’s your choice to chase them. It’s the most refreshing approach to difficulty I’ve seen in a long time; there’s no difficulty settings here and it’s the same level everyone else plays, the difference is just a (probably misplaced) sense of confidence in your own mastery of the game that prompts you to go through the teleporter for the second run.

Baldur’s Gate 3

I feel a little resentful about having to include this on the “good” list for 2023. Only a little, since mechanically and structurally Baldur’s Gate 3 is a brilliant RPG. It’s not exactly groundbreaking since it’s a natural extension of the ideas found in Larian’s previous work (to the point where it really should be called Original Sin 3 instead of Baldur’s Gate 3) but since nobody else is really making this kind of game it still feels fresh, open-ended and full of possibility in a way that most RPGs don’t. The combat feels very Original Sin despite being a relatively faithful adaptation of the 5th edition D&D ruleset; there’s a heavy focus on teleporting around and applying massively destructive elemental effects to broad swathes of the battlefield, and the newfound verticality in many of the combat locations means a simple successful “Shove” action can send a tough boss plummeting fifty feet down to a hard landing — or into a bottomless pit that instakills them — allowing for far more creativity and flexibility in character builds than “Tank” or “Damage dealer”. Baldur’s Gate 3’s particular success is in marrying the Original Sin combat up to a seventy-hour adventure that’s genuinely sprawling, with multiple paths available for you to take that significantly change up the narrative to a degree that I haven’t seen since Alpha Protocol. Most of the decision points that shunt you onto an alternative story path aren’t signposted, either; they’re pretty subtle and there’s a lot of them, resulting in an adventure that feels genuinely organic and personalised to you. As an RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 is almost as ambitious as Wrath of the Righteous, and unlike Owlcat Larian actually do have the resources and the time to deliver on that ambition without the player having to fight their way through a million bugs.

Why, then, did I say I resent Baldur’s Gate 3? Well, it’s for the reason you’d think, but not in the way you’d think: the original Baldur’s Gate “trilogy” is somewhere in my top 5 games of all time, but while the decision to take the name and apply it to something that looked like it had nothing to do with the Bhaalspawn saga did initially rankle with me quite a bit, Baldur’s Gate 3 had been in Early Access for three years prior to its release and I’d long made my peace with it. I was ready for something new. I was expecting something new. If Baldur’s Gate 3 had just advanced the timeline by 100 years and used D&D concepts and locations to tell a new story, I wouldn’t be sitting here complaining. And initially that’s what it appeared it was going to do, but as I got further and further into the game the scattered callbacks and references to the original games turned into returning characters and major plot points, and then finally into some absolutely incredible retconning of Throne of Bhaal that would substantially diminish the ending of the OG trilogy if I took it seriously in any way. Fortunately I don’t, but that means I can’t take the rest of Baldur’s Gate 3’s story seriously either; it feels rather too much like somebody’s personal Baldur’s Gate fanfiction instead of something with enough sense and courage to try and stand on its own two feet.

(And then there’s what I’m going to refer to as the “Critical Role” problem, which is more my problem than the game’s but which did significantly contribute to the story failing to land with me in any way whatsoever: the D&D of 2023 is decidedly not the D&D of 1998. No, this D&D fucks, and the game goes out of its way time and again to remind you about it. I remember the original Dragon Age trailers being ridiculed for trying way too hard to be edgy for the sake of edginess, to make fantasy seem cool and adult, but what was ridiculous in 2009 is now apparently normal in 2023 because Baldur’s Gate 3 makes that shit look tame. Times do change, and there’s a lot of people out there who like that kind of thing — Critical Role is super popular for a reason  — but when my character gets propositioned by every single party member during their second camp conversation, well, that’s another big reason why I can’t take the game seriously.)

Anyway, my hating the story isn’t going to stop Baldur’s Gate 3 from winning a whole bunch of GOTY awards, and it isn’t even going to stop it appearing on my own “best of” list. As I said, mechanically and structurally it’s an incredible achievement, and I had great fun min-maxing my way through the combat — and because my standard policy was to kill anyone who was trying to stop me from getting to a quest objective without doing their tedious fetch quests first, I saw a lot of combat. I love that Baldur’s Gate 3 let me do that without any judgement (you can’t do it in the original trilogy unless you enjoy being constantly swarmed by hordes of guards that materialise out of thin air). I’m happy it’s been so successful, as it hopefully means we’ll see future RPGs try and borrow from Baldur’s Gate 3’s open-ended approach to quests and combat.  I just wish it hadn’t been called Baldur’s Gate 3, is all.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

You’ll probably have seen a lot of breathy news articles about Cyberpunk 2077’s “redemption”, that after three years of post-release patches to fix all of the many, many bugs — and to completely redesign the game in some places — it’s now the game that it should always have been. Which, if you squint a bit and substantially lower your expectations, it is. It’s a pretty good first-person open world RPG, nothing more, and nothing less; it’s not the broken mess it was on launch, but neither is it in any way transformative for the genre except for some innovations in how it handles first-person perspective. (And even there I think it’s helped along more by Bethesda having such a death-grip on the genre that any deviation from that formula feels like a breath of fresh air.) You run around doing mostly the same things you do in other open world RPGs, repeatedly driving through a too-large map to clear up an infestation of question mark symbols, and while it’s executed with a bit more pizazz than usual — partly a result of the budget, and partly a result of encounter design that is a significant cut above what you’d find in an Ubisoft game — Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t going to dramatically alter your expectations of what an open world RPG can or should be.

Phantom Liberty, though. I’m not sure if it’s just because 2023 was utterly starved of any decent narrative experiences (mostly thanks to the Final Fantasy 14 writing team taking an extended multi-year nap) but, while it initially didn’t seem like anything all that special, no other game this year came close to the powerful feeling of catharsis I experienced on reaching the end. It’s a spy thriller where you have to navigate a web of shifting loyalties, deciding who to trust and who to betray, and where the major decisions feel genuinely weighty and you never take them lightly. Phantom Liberty achieves this through presentation and narrative structure more than it does any particular spectacular feat of writing, but it’s no less remarkable for this. It’s called storytelling, after all, and there’s increasingly few game devs who can actually leverage the medium they work in to enhance that storytelling instead of just trying to copy a movie. That’s why I reacted to Phantom Liberty more positively than I might otherwise have done; just like Cyberpunk itself I think it’s good rather than great, but even something that’s “just” good still stands out in a field of comparative mediocrity.

World of Warcraft Classic: Hardcore

A Hardcore mode for World of Warcraft? Where you only get one life, and if you die you’re permanently dead with no take-backs, and can thus potentially see dozens (or even hundreds) of hours of progress disappear down the toilet? For Classic, no less –. the much slower, grindier 2004 edition of the game where nothing is handed to you for free? Sounds like a stupid idea dreamt up by MMO masochists. It’ll never catch on.

…is what I thought the first time I heard about it. Sticking a Hardcore mode in Classic should not work. There’s no accommodations made for it aside from tweaking some quests and abilities that either rely on player death, or make it easy to avoid it. It’s the same game otherwise, and Classic can be notoriously unforgiving at times — hell, make that most of the time. It’s all too easy for a single bad monster pull or monster spawn to kill your all-too-fragile character out of nowhere, and embarking on high-risk elite quests and dungeon runs is kind of like asking them to play Russian roulette.

Paradoxically, though, it’s the very fact that it’s the same game that means Hardcore mode does work. Since Classic hasn’t changed and is just as dangerous as ever, it’s up to you — and the wider playerbase — to change how you play it in order to maximise your chances of survival. Classic has always been a slow game (and in comparison to modern WoW it’s borderline glacial), but in Hardcore mode you have to take it even slower than that, sticking to safer areas, taking the time to grind up extra levels, and never, ever taking any risks — or at least, not taking risks without Batman levels of preparation and planning. Remember those crappy Minor Potions of Vitality that add a paltry couple of dozen HP onto your health bar, and which you’d never ever bother with in regular Classic? In Hardcore mode those extra health points could be the difference between life and death. Buffs from passing players are, similarly, an absolute godsend. Optimised quest paths have long relied on using your hearthstone to teleport long distances and cut out some of the grind, but in Hardcore you suck it up and walk everywhere because the hearthstone has a one hour cooldown and it’s your last resort for getting yourself out of a mine that’s turned into a deathtrap. Seeing other players doing the same quests as me annoyed the crap out of me in normal WoW as I’d have to fight with them for mob kills, but in Hardcore it’s reassuring as they’ll probably help you out if a pull goes bad and it looks like you’re about to die — that is, as long as it’s not too risky for them, so if you’re being chased through Darkshire by Stitches don’t expect them to lift a finger.

This is not a playstyle that will suit everyone. It’s slow, it makes an already grindy game even grinder, and it can be dreadfully boring if you’re actively focusing on it 100% of the time. More than that, it relies on a lot of pre-existing game knowledge of what the most dangerous quests and enemies are so that you can avoid them; I definitely would not recommend Classic Hardcore to anyone who hadn’t put serious time into vanilla WoW either on its original release twenty years ago, or upon its rebirth as Classic in 2017. But if you do have that knowledge, and a second monitor to watch Youtube or listen to podcasts on, there’s something weirdly zen about Classic Hardcore. It’s the last thing I was expecting from this mode where I could potentially lose it all at any moment, but being forced to take it slow because of that risk gave me a new level of appreciation for WoW; the base game really was something special, and while the game’s been solved for decades and it’ll never be possible to recapture the sense of possibility and adventure WoW offered back in 2004, Hardcore mode at least presents an opportunity to experience it from a different perspective, and through fresh eyes.

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Yes, I suppose it’s fitting that it is, once again, the prospect of reviewing a mercenary management game that rouses me from my months-long torpor. I like mercenary management games. I think they have a lot of really interesting gameplay decisions baked into the core concept in ways that other tactical strategy games struggle to justify, or which they omit entirely. Jagged Alliance 2, Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries¹, Battle Brothers, BattleTech – no matter what the setting is, if you show me a mercenary management game the chances are that it’ll be a hit with me. And sure enough, I liked Wartales, too.

For the first 10 hours or so, anyway.

Unfortunately Wartales has a very immediate problem to overcome. It’s a mercenary management game set in a low fantasy² world where you control a company of 5-20 mercenaries travelling around the land taking contracts and slaying bandits. You equip them, you feed them, you level them up, you decide where to go next and what you’ll do when you get there. Armour acts as an ablative extra layer of hitpoints that must be depleted in full before you can start chopping body parts off; damaged armour needs to be repaired after every battle using tools you carry around in your party inventory. Your attack abilities are determined by the weapon you have equipped – so a one-handed mace can be used to bop a single target over the head, but a two-handed mace swings in a wide arc in front of you that can hit multiple people. Your mercenaries need to be paid regularly; if they’re not paid, or you don’t feed them, they will get upset and leave.

Now, this all sounds perfectly fine on the face of it, and is pretty much what I expect when I play a mercenary management game. The problem Wartales has, though, is that this is also exactly what Battle Brothers did 6 years ago, almost to the letter, in almost exactly the same kind of setting. Battle Brothers is an excellent game that I keep meaning to put more time into, and in hindsight I’d rather have spent 40 hours replaying that instead of ploughing more and more effort into Wartales to try and see if it was actually going anywhere — but we’ll get to that in due course. The point is, the release version of Battle Brothers outclasses Wartales in almost every respect, and it’s only gotten better since then thanks to some unexpected DLC support. It has a much wider variety of equipment, giving you many more options in combat and choices around how to build your mercenaries. It has a much wider variety of enemies which require distinctly different approaches to defeat, ensuring that the repeated tactical battles are less likely to become dull. It has a much wider variety of contracts, and a much wider variety of music — in fact it has one of the best strategy game soundtracks of the last 10 years, which is really really important when you’re going to be listening to the battle music in particular for hours on end. (Wartales, by contrast, has 3 completely unremarkable battle tracks that you’ll be thoroughly sick of by the end of the first region.)

In the areas where Wartales can be directly compared to Battle Brothers, then, it feels incredibly basic. Some of this is the result of intentional design decisions, like the combat being a much lighter affair than the individual unit morale stats and armour penetration mechanics of Battle Brothers — I’ll break down the combat properly towards the end of the review, so for now I’ll just say that it’s much more along the lines of something like Expeditions Rome, or Original Sin 2 without the magic. Mostly, though, it feels like the result of a particularly scattershot game development approach, where the development team wanted to do a lot of things, did not have the time or resources to do all of them well or in a particularly joined-up way, and instead of cutting scope to focus on the most important ones they instead just decided to do all of them anyway and push them out of the door in a barely-MVP³ state. As a result Wartales comes across as a not-particularly-focused grab-bag of stuff, some of which works but a lot of which doesn’t, and which has no great unifying vision behind it — and so of course it comes off worse in comparison to Battle Brothers, which was built around its combat system from the ground up and so had a very clear mission statement: give the player interesting fights. (And I’m slightly shocked that that wasn’t also the priority for Wartales given how heavily it does end up leaning on the combat.)

As wasteful as this development approach might be, though, it does also mean that Wartales can come up with an answer to the question “Why should I play Wartales when Battle Brothers exists?” Because while it might be a grab-bag of features that don’t feed into each other in particularly interesting ways, it is a much larger bag than you might expect from one of these games and the chances are you’ll probably find something in there to hook your interest — at least to start with.

The camp is probably the best place to start when describing what else Wartales is doing to try and justify your time. When you’re walking around the world you have a fatigue bar at the top of the screen that’s ticking down. When it runs out, you need to rest; you need to feed your mercs during every rest period and pay them after every 3 rests. You can rest at any time by hitting the “Camp” button, which takes you to the camp screen. This starts out as just a simple fire with a workshop next to it as the only two pieces of equipment in your camp. Mercs can be assigned to each piece of camp equipment to get minor bonuses – the fire gives a happiness bonus for each merc next to it, while the workshop passively generates repair tools for fixing up your armour after a fight. Your mercenaries have set combat classes that determine which weapons they can use, but they also have a second gathering or crafting profession that you can pick and which they level up separately. If you have a Tinkerer in your company you can use the Workshop to craft minor sundries (lockpicks, ropes etc.) as well as other camp equipment – a Cooking Pot to reduce food requirements and which allows a mercenary with the Cook profession to produce more satisfying meals from the raw ingredients you acquire on your travels, or a Tent that grants more action points in battle the more mercenaries are sleeping in it, or a Hitching Post that increases the carrying capacity of your pack horses.

Adding new equipment to your camp and upgrading it to give bigger bonuses is key to building and supporting a bigger mercenary company. It’s not a massive part of the game beyond that as you basically just assign one appropriately-skilled merc to each piece of equipment and then put any excess into the Tent, but it is nice to see your progress as a company visually reflected somewhere as all of your mercs and horses and animal companions will be somewhere on the camp screen. Crafting and gathering is similarly basic-yet-impactful; you can find small amounts of raw materials while walking around in the overworld, but if you want big payoff of iron (for example) you visit a mine and get your Miner to play a clicking-on-the-circles minigame ripped straight out of an MMO circa 2010⁴. If you want to catch some fish, you visit a fishing spot and get your Fisherman to play the exact same keep-the-bar-between-the-two-red-zones fishing minigame you can find in literally every other title with a fishing minigame out there. If you want your Bard to sing in a tavern, you get them to play Guitar Hero. (I am absolutely not joking about this.)

Now, obviously none of these things are at all innovative, but visiting dedicated resource nodes like this does add an extra level of consideration to your overworld travels beyond just beelining for the next contract marker, especially since the equipment that you can craft using these gathered resources is the best equipment available for whatever your current level is. Enemies do drop weapons and armour after a fight, but it’s invariably just placeholder stuff that will get you by until you can outfit everyone in Ghost Brigandine and give them Ghost weapons. They might be mechanically uninteresting, but engaging with these systems does lead to real, tangible increases in power for your mercenaries on the battlefield — it’s the bare minimum I’d ask of crafting/gathering in a videogame, but I see enough games completely fluff it that I’m nevertheless pleased that the Wartales implementation hits somewhere close to the mark.

Continuing on the theme of “mechanics that have been outright stolen from other games”, the way Wartales deals with the more criminal side of being a mercenary is straight out of Skyrim. If you have somebody with the Thief profession in your company you can send them in to steal expensive items from merchants in lieu of actually paying for them; Thieves are also the ones who open locked containers via the standard Elder Scrolls lockpicking minigame. Stealing items in this way raises a Suspicion meter, and once you go over 100 Suspicion you become Wanted and the previously-friendly guard patrols you find out in the overworld will start running up to you and challenging you; it must have been very difficult for the Wartales developers to not have these dialogues start with “Stop right there, criminal scum!” but they’ve somehow managed it. If you fight it out with guards your Suspicion rating goes up further to 200, 300, all the way up to 600, with each threshold spawning more guard patrols, and I’m similarly surprised that Shiro Games didn’t represent this visually with some kind of star system. Still, the fact that you can engage in some criminal activity without immediately triggering a response from the law is welcome; a Suspicion meter that’s completely empty is a resource that’s going unused, and so you might as well engage in a little bit of petty larceny just to save some money.

I like that Wartales succeeds in encouraging the player to be a bit of a dick, regardless of the mechanics used to get there being totally derivative; historical mercenary companies were absolutely infamous for this and so it’s part of the experience as far as I’m concerned. However there is a related mechanic that is entirely Wartales’ own that makes me a different kind of concerned, and this is the Prisoner mechanic. Each region on the world map has a Jail you can visit, either to recruit the prisoners already there or to buy sets of heavy chains; if you have chains in your party inventory you can attempt to capture wounded enemies during combat; if successful, you can take them back to a Jail and turn them in in exchange for a reduction in your Suspicion rating. Since most of the enemy mobs you fight are bandits and outlaws this does make a certain amount of sense, but the more I looked at this mechanic the more my own personal Suspicion rating started to creep up.

You see, there is not a single contract type that revolves around capturing enemies; it’s never a mission objective, and in 40 hours of playtime I’ve only been required to do it once as part of a region’s main questline. This was a bit weird, because there are dedicated structures you can build in your base to make prisoner management easier — but why is this necessary when you’re never asked to do it and you’re only going to be handling any prisoners you do take for a brief period until you dump them in a Jail? It took an embarrassingly long time for this to click, but became too obvious to ignore once I got to one of the later game regions and one of the NPCs in the Jail there was selling utility items you can give to prisoners to increase their carrying capacity as well as a schematic for a whipping post to improve their “performance”: these are supposed to be slaves. They have implemented slavery in the game and are hoping people won’t notice because they’ve changed the name. There’s even an achievement for whipping a “prisoner” to death, for crying out loud! The overriding obsession that developers of low fantasy games have with including dedicated slavery mechanics in their games⁵ continues to astonish me, as does the fact that not a single review of Wartales that I’ve read has seen fit to mention it.

That omission is probably more understandable in light of the game’s overworld design, though, which is the final way Wartales differs from Battle Brothers: instead of being randomly generated, Wartales’ world is entirely hand-crafted. Unfortunately, because Wartales really doesn’t have an original bone in its body, the design principles that Shiro have used to do so have been ripped straight out of a late-stage Ubisoft open world game like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and are therefore deeply tedious. The game world is split into regions, each with its own set of points of interest — denoted by the ubiquitous question mark icons — and main questline that you are strongly encouraged to complete before moving on to the next region. The points of interest are almost all incredibly shallow, being structures like windmills and farms that require you to do nothing more than a couple of conversation interactions with the NPCs there before the inevitable green tick appears indicating that the location has been completed; the one exception are the Tombs of the Ancients, which are a mix of dungeon crawling and puzzle-solving that I really did quite like, but there’s only one of those in each region. Meanwhile the main questlines are a series of five missions that each invariably involves killing a bunch of people, and your main goal in each region is to bulk up your mercenary company to the point where you’re capable of taking on all of those fights plus the the “bossfight” at the end (which is just a regular fight where one unit has a special weapon or something). And then it’s on to the next region, where…

…you get to do exactly the same thing all over again. The first three regions of Wartales — Tiltren, Arthes and Vertruse — are literally identical. They have the same terrain type of endless rolling fields and forests interspersed with the odd bit of mountain. They have the same points of interest; the same set of windmills and farms and mines and fisheries and abandoned towers, over and over again. They have the same enemy types — the fact that you only ever really fight human enemies is an absolutely massive problem for the game, as we shall shortly see when I get onto the combat — and you’ve seen all of them by the time you’re done with the first region. The only real difference is in the content of the region questlines, which are not substantial enough to make them in any way distinctive. I can’t really blame game reviewers who didn’t get far enough into the game to see all of the prisoner mechanic when it took me nearly forty hours to finish fighting my way through these three identikit regions. Then I dragged myself into the fourth region, Ludern, which was finally, finally somewhere different; I actually let out a sort of involuntary crazed half-laugh when I saw exactly what I was dealing with there, because it turns out Ludern is the game’s Swamp Level. I hate swamp levels. I did try to persevere, but the swampiness of it all, combined with the extreme repetitiveness of the game’s combat, had finally broken me.

The thing is, somewhat ironically given how much I’ve mentioned it, there’s not actually all that much to say about Wartales’s combat as the actual combat mechanics themselves are pretty spartan. Not bad as such, just very, very basic. Your mercenaries each get a movement allowance and a basic attack ability granted by their currently-equipped weapon that they can use once. They might also have an additional attack ability granted by their perk tree, but you’ll have to spend a Valour Point in order to use it; this is a global pool of action points that is used across your entire company and which is only replenished when the party rests in the overworld, and it would have introduced some moderately interesting resourcing decisions if the game didn’t also have about a billion ways to generate “temporary” Valour Points that ensure you’ll never not have access to your bonus abilities. Still, one set of movement and two attacks per turn, per mercenary, is not much – especially when your enemies all have bloated health bars (an equivalent-level enemy will have around 20-30% more HP and armour than a mercenary of the same class type outfitted in best-in-slot armour). You can have up to 20 “companions” in your troop, which can be mercenaries, pack horses or various types of animal that you’ve tamed, but I’m reasonably sure at this point that Wartales is adjusting enemy group sizes based on the number of human companions in my mercenary band, as they are almost always the same size as my group plus or minus one – so you’ll never be able to bring a numerical advantage to bear. And trading damage on equal terms with enemy patrols is a losing proposition; even if everyone survives, you’d lose so much armour that the repair cost would massively outweigh any benefits from winning the fight in the first place.

This is why the key aspect of Wartales combat isn’t about leveraging ability combos in clever ways, and neither is it about applying any of the numerous status effects available to you. Instead, Wartales combat is all about abusing the turn order to make sure that the enemy takes as few turns — and thus causes as little damage — as possible. I’ve yet to figure out how exactly the turn order works when one side does have a numerical advantage (which can happen in the enemy’s favour in some Hard contracts or main scenario battles, or in your favour in the later stages of a battle when you’ve killed most of the enemy), but since the sides are almost always equal to start with it’s quite easy to describe: you move one mercenary, then an enemy unit moves, then you move another mercenary, then another enemy unit moves, and so on. The trick is that the enemy turn order (i.e. the order the enemy units will move in) is set in advance, remains static throughout the turn, and can be viewed by you at any time — but you are not bound by any such restrictions, so when it’s your go you can move any mercenary you want.

So, here’s how a typical Wartales combat plays out (for my party, anyway). Enemy parties are usually split into two or more distinct groups on the battlefield, so I set my company up surrounding one of them – this means the other one will probably not be able to move into melee range on their first turn, effectively wasting it. In the group I have decided to kill first, I check which enemy is moving first. If it’s an enemy with too much armour to feasibly kill before they can move (usually a tanky shield unit of some kind), I send in my own shield users to Engage them; this locks them down and prevents them from attacking anyone else except my shield user, who has both passive and active damage reduction from the shield and will take only a few points of damage where one of my squishier units would take 20 or 30. This effectively removes them from the fight until I’m ready to deal with them. If the next enemy to move is a lightly armoured enemy, such as a rogue or an archer, then I kill them with a high-damage unit — archers are ideal for this, and axe users have a devastating area-effect alpha strike ability that can kill two or more enemy units with their first attack of the battle if the positioning is kind.  If an enemy is killed before they can take their turn, they simply drop out of the turn order and it skips back to my turn again. I then repeat the process. As long as I haven’t fucked up my positioning on the initial deployment none of the lighter enemy units will ever survive to take their turn, and this makes fights much more tractable.

But it’s also substantially less interesting. Optimising my party to produce the devastating alpha strikes required to keep control of the turn order was a decent metagame problem for the first 10-15 hours of Wartales, but then I solved it. From that point on every battle has played out effectively the same way; it is a strategy that works against all equivalent-level human enemies and all roving packs of animals (wolves, boars and bears), and because there’s only ever one battle objective — kill all of the enemies — I never need to change it. All I need to worry about is making sure my equipment doesn’t become obsolete to the point that one-shotting weaker enemies is no longer possible. And the thing is, I’ve seen nothing to make me think that playing the game any other way is actually viable. The enemies, on the rare occasions when I am caught out of position and they manage to hit me properly, hit hard enough to convince me that I’d lose quite quickly in a stand-up fight – and it’s not like I’m wearing low-level armour, either! As far as I can tell this is how I’m supposed to be winning the combats.

So this is already not ideal; not only does the game have extremely limited enemy variety to start with, but there’s a one-size-fits-all strategy that’ll deal with every one of the few enemy types that it does have⁶. Here’s the kicker, though: my mercenary party is currently level 7. To get from level 7 to level 8 requires 3,500 XP. Fighting a group of level 7 enemies grants 60-70 XP. Quests and contracts do not grant XP rewards, and so there are no other sources of XP outside of random camp events (and those bonuses are only applied to one or two mercs, not the whole group). This means that in order to get to level 8, I need to fight 50-60 combats. And that’s just to advance one level; from the perk tree I see that it goes up to at least level 12, so if I stick with Wartales there are hundreds of these repetitive, solved combat encounters in my future.

(I just read this back over and just realised I didn’t mention the battle UI, which is absolutely awful. It doesn’t tell you which enemies you can hit from a position you’re thinking of moving to; it doesn’t allow takebacks if you’ve have moved somewhere and it turns out you can’t actually hit your desired target; it doesn’t have mercenary nameplates or any ability to zoom in or out, making it impossible to tell your mercenaries apart when they’re all dressed in the same best-in-slot armour sets; and the Move and End Turn buttons are 1) right next to each other and 2) exactly the same colour, making it very easy to accidentally end your turn instead of moving on to the next target. This is all really basic stuff that even full fat RPGs whose focus isn’t wholly on tactical strategy have had figured out for at least 5 years now, and a large part of my deciding to drop Wartales was not being able to face the prospect of dealing with these UI issues for another hundred combats.)

This means that I’ve very much reached the point where I decide that a game is no longer worth my time. I had some fun with Wartales in spite of everything; I’m never happier than when I’m untangling a set of systems, and Wartales has a lot of systems to untangle, no matter how derivative they might be. The novelty soon wore off, though, and it was a horrible disappointment to discover that the second region was basically the same as the first one, and that the third region was the same as the first two, and by the time Wartales had decided to show me something different it had completely burned through any currency it had built up with me; I was thoroughly sick and tired of nearly everything that it was doing, and I simply could not face the idea of playing it any more. If you want a satisfying low fantasy tactical strategy game, you should avoid Wartales and play the far superior Battle Brothers. Yes, even if you’ve played it already. Don’t make the same mistake I did of thinking Wartales might be meaningfully different in some way, because while it might have a few semi-interesting ideas around the edges it ultimately leans more heavily on its combat than Battle Brothers does — and here it’s far too insubstantial to support the amount of repetition demanded of it, to say nothing of the amount of repetition to be found in the rest of the game in general.

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