To me, Civilization 2 has for many years been the Bigfoot of the Civilization series. You can find the original Civilization on abandonware sites quite easily, and once you’ve got it you can run it via DOSBox with zero fuss. You can buy Civilizations 3 and 4 on Steam, and they both still work fine apart from the missing Gamespy functionality and the occasional crash to desktop. But Civilization 2? It’s not available on GOG, but acquiring a copy of Civilization 2 via alternative methods is just as easy as Civilization (so long as you’re happy with losing the music, the wonder videos and the advisors, anyway); however, it was a Windows-native game released in 1996 — in other words, that awkward period where Microsoft were still sorting themselves out in terms of drivers and APIs for Windows-native games. Consequently it doesn’t play nicely at all with modern versions of Windows, and since it doesn’t have a commercial release on a digital distribution platform it’s entirely reliant on dedicated fans to drag it into a state of semi-compatibility. Getting it to work on Windows 7 was a bit tricky, but doable. Getting it to work on Windows 10 was nigh-impossible until a new fan patch was released towards the end of 2017 that specifically addressed Windows 10 compatibility; up until I found out about it I was seriously considering installing Windows XP on a virtual machine just so that I could play Civilization 2 again.

Fortunately, unlike all of the other fan patches I tried the new one works quite well, and so I get to enjoy classic Civilization 2 upscaled to a resolution that would have made my eyeballs drop out of their sockets had I experienced it in 1996. It scales nicely, too, since it went for some quite chunky unit sprites and terrain tiles that retain all of their character (as well as their readability) when displayed at 1920×1080 instead of 800×600. Because it runs as a windowed app and uses, well, Windows windows for its interface panels (another reason why backwards compatibility for it is a pain) there’s some weirdness around trying to access things while e.g. the City Interface panel is open — Windows 10 flat out won’t let you — but otherwise it’s aged remarkably well, far better than the original Civilization and it also arguably looks better than either Civilization 3 or Alpha Centauri.

Design-wise Civilization 2 is rather interesting, because of all the Civilization sequels it’s the only one that was a direct evolution from its predecessor. There’s no major new mechanics introduced in Civilization 2; it’s still very recognisably the same game with an SVGA facelift and the rough edges sanded off. It makes changes, sure, but the changes it makes are more the sort of thing I’d expect an expansion pack to do in this day and age: bulking out the tech tree, adding more units and improvements for a smoother flow through the medieval and industrial ages, and tweaking wonder effects. This is the main reason why playing the original Civilization is a little redundant unless you’re feeling particularly nostalgic for it, since Civilization 2 is quite literally everything that Civilization was — and more.

Civilization 2 does set out to tackle some of the most egregious mechanical flaws that cropped up in Civilization, mind. First, the Pyramids -> Democracy loophole has been closed off, as Pyramids now gives you a free Granary in every city (still really good) and the ability to switch to any government has been moved to the much later Statue of Liberty wonder. The government system and corruption all work the same way, so brute-forcing Democracy onto your empire is still a very good strategy, but it’s nowhere near as easy to pull off as it was in Civilization. Then there’s the combat system, which has been made far less random. It still works on attack/defence value totals (e.g. if a unit with attack value 6 attacks a unit with defence value 3, it has a two in three chance to win a round of combat as the total of both values is 9 and 6 is two-thirds of 9) but is now fought over several rounds. To accommodate this all units now have an HP bar that gets depleted when they lose a round of combat rather than the unit being instantly destroyed. Not only does spreading the combat rolls out over several rounds mean that the effect of the odd statistical anomaly is greatly lessened, but unit HP increases with the technology era of the unit, increasing the number of successful rolls that an obsolete unit will require to win. I’m sure there’s still a mathematical possibility for spearmen to beat tanks in Civilization 2, but I’ve never seen it happen and I doubt you will either.

Some of the additions Civilization 2 makes are also worth talking about because I don’t think they showed up again in any subsequent Civilization. Conquering a city will result in several Partisan units immediately spawning nearby to blow up all of the railway lines; this is Civilization 2’s rather crude attempt to discourage warmongering players from conquering the world, but later Civs went for a more nuanced approach via city pops and happiness penalties. You can build Superhighways in your cities to boost trade yields from tiles with roads by 50%, which is stupidly powerful since railroads boost tile yields on their own so you’re already building roads in every single city tile. Once Refrigeration is researched you can upgrade irrigated tiles into farm tiles, which yield one additional food so long as the city working the tile has a Supermarket improvement. This, again, is stupidly powerful. Your Settlers get upgraded to Engineers when you research Explosives, and Engineers can terraform undesirable tiles such as desert and mountains into plains and grassland, although it’ll take them a long time. Once you hit the modern era in Civilization 2 there’s a real sense of being able to use all of that shiny technology you’ve been researching to bend the world to your will. This isn’t really surprising since the lead designer was Brian Reynolds and his next game was Alpha Centauri, a game all about using technology to shatter every single one of the barriers constraining your expansion into tiny pieces, but it does make Civilization 2’s later stages feel very different from the later games, which rowed back on that idea considerably

For example, I don’t think any of them feature terraforming beyond chopping down/planting forests, likely in an attempt to combat Infinite City Sprawl. There’s no such thing as a bad city site in Civilization 2, because any bad city site can at some point be turned into a good city site. Even if you settle on a one-tile island it can eventually be made worthwhile with the Harbor and Offshore Platform improvements, which add food and production to sea tiles. Consequently ICS is an absolutely obnoxious problem in Civilization 2, especially given that the AI is just as flagrant with its territorial violations as in the original and is also very capable of using ships to transport Settlers in the ancient age; the AI in more recent Civs would wait until much later to do that, if it did it at all. You feel like you have to settle on any scrap of land that’s unused, even if you’re not going to get that much out of it right now, because if you don’t the AI eventually will. When you uncover the map by discovering Satellites (another new innovation, as Civilization only gave you city locations) it’s shocking to see just how densely packed it is with cities. And more cities means more to micromanage, as production queues aren’t introduced until Civilization 3.

As a consequence it can be a bit wearing to play Civilization 2 into the late game. Because I hadn’t played it in so long I’d built it up in my head to be rather more than it was, and it was a little disappointing to discover that it didn’t quite live up to the memories of my after-school play sessions. I said earlier that it had aged well, and it has, but Civilization 2 instead comes across as being rather dated. Being dated is a rather more ambiguous quality than being aged — Back To The Future and The Terminator are very conspicuously dated, but that doesn’t stop them from being classics — and quite aside from some of the more tired gameplay aspects Civilization 2 definitely feels like a game released into the Windows 95 era. There’s that use of native Windows functionality and fonts, for a start, followed by the totally unnecessary yet not wholly-unwelcome full motion video that you could find jammed into just about every game from this period, because computer games were still much smaller than the total amount of storage available on a CD and developers had to do something with all of that space.

Civilization 2 was the first game in the series to feature wonder videos, which put together archive video and/or panning shots over historical images of the thing you just built with a very cheesy midi track. Today they look a bit high school history project-y, but you can see how we got from there to the excellent Secret Project videos in Alpha Centauri, and even though they’re cheap by modern standards they still have an atmosphere of respect for — and wonder at — the thing you’ve just built. Every time your council meets you get these incredibly cheesy videos of LARPers in tacky period-appropriate costumes spouting advice about what to do next, which other people are quite fond of but which I am not and always turn off at the first opportunity. And then, finally, you’ve got the music. The base game shipped with some basic midi tracks, but the Test Of Time expansion added a bunch of custom scenarios with dedicated music which is probably still the best soundtrack in a series replete with excellent soundtracks; it’s a set of weirdly off-kilter themes that are supposed to represent fantasy and sci-fi worlds which are somehow incredibly appropriate for charting the march of your civilization from the ancient age to the modern one.

Many of these features that were all the rage at the time come off as rather gimmicky today, of course, but they do serve to give Civilization 2 the most character of the first three Civilization titles. Because it’s mostly choosing to refine an already-successful formula instead of breaking new ground it’s also the most well-rounded of the three, and is the one which is easiest to slip back into today. It feels like Civilization as it was originally envisaged, before subsequent designers began moving it further and further away from its starting point, and aside from missing quality-of-life features (like production queues) that elegance of design presents remarkably few friction points for players revisiting it twenty-three years later. Civilization 4 eventually dragged the series into the modern age, and Civilization 5 was patched to the point where it could more-or-less sit next to 4 without instantly withering away like a Nazi drinking from the wrong Grail, and I think both of them are better games — but they also both feel like bigger commitments than Civilization 2, whose comparatively simple mechanics make it easy to pick up and complete multiple games in a single afternoon. That, along with its very different character, ensures that even now, after almost a quarter of a century, Civilization 2 can still hold its own against the latest and greatest the 4X genre has to offer.

The post Civilization Through The Ages: Civilization 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Over the Christmas break I found myself playing through Civilization 4 for the first time in about ten years. It did a lot of neat stuff that I’d just plain forgotten about, so I decided to play through all of the Civilization games to see how well they held up today and how the series had evolved from one iteration to the next, and then write something summing up that experience so that I’ll have something to refer back to when I inevitably forget again.

———————————————

Civilization has the distinction of being the very first game I played on a proper IBM PC. This was way back in my school computer room in 1995, which was an environment that was far too cheap for Windows 95 and the flashy multimedia games that came with it, and so the four year-old Civilization was the best we could manage on the 386s we had available. By this point I’d played newer, better-looking games on the Atari, Archimedes and Megadrive (not to mention Doom and Command & Conquer on some weird PC card hookup jammed into an Acorn RISC PC), and Civilization looked positively primitive by comparison. It didn’t matter. I was instantly hooked.

Well, of course I was. Ever since I played Mega Lo Mania there’s been something particularly intoxicating to me about that image of cavemen versus soldiers on the front cover, and Civilization was an entire game that took that idea and applied it to the real world. It was also the first game I played where military confrontation took a backseat to city logistics and scientific advancement. War is obviously a big part of Civilization — probably bigger than in any of the sequels, just purely as a consequence of there being comparatively fewer other mechanics for it to fall back on — but there’s a non-violent way to win and you can get through an entire game without fighting anyone, if you play it right. This was just as well given the primitive combat mechanics, since you could never quite be sure what was going to happen when you threw your troops at the enemy; the original Civilization is the game that originated the infamous “spearmen beating tanks” phenomenon, after all.

In spite of how undeveloped this and other parts of Civilization are, going back to it I was pleasantly surprised at how well it held up twenty-eight years after it was released . I’m not saying I’d particularly choose to play it over certain later iterations if I didn’t have a nostalgic fondness for the way it does things, but even if I cast the rose-tinted glasses aside I can’t think of any games contemporary to Civilization that have aged anywhere near as well¹. I think part of the reason why this is so is that Civilization itself was inspired by a boardgame and so this first iteration is possibly the most boardgame-y Civillization of them all. Boardgames (or at least good boardgames) have a much longer shelf-life than your average videogame because they focus on clean, transparent mechanics above all else. Civilization follows that line of thinking, preferring a relatively small number of advances and improvements which have sweeping, powerful effects which are nevertheless quite simple and whose value is easily understood by the player.

Take the Library as an example. In modern Civs this improvement does something anaemic like giving you an extra two scientist slots that can be worked by citizens, which creates something like six points of extra science and which is only powerful because of how miserly the later games are with resource gain. On the other hand the original implementation of the Library was that it increased science gain in that city by a whopping 50%; given that base science yields are already quite high (thanks to it being a function of trade value converted to science instead of a dedicated science resource), the effect of building a Library in a single city is immediately noticeable on an empire scale. It feels good to build a Library in Civilization, even 24 years after I first played it. It feels like I’m making big steps towards building up my empire, instead of the infinitesimal power increases of the later games.

Because there’s less to build (but the things you can build do more), the ancient-medieval phase of Civilization ends up feeling quite nippy. Build times are quite long until your cities have a few population units under their belt, but there’s no fancy animations getting the way and it’s much faster at doing the number-crunching that follows every End Turn action, meaning that waiting ten turns for your Temple to finish is actually faster than waiting five turns for something to complete in one of the newer games. There’s also no Worker units to micromanage; at this point we’re using Settlers to build tile improvements, and maintaining Settler units is very expensive in terms of production and food, so early on you’re only going to be able to spare one or two at most. However, because of that limitation tile improvements are much faster to build, with roads being built instantly and irrigation taking 4-5 turns.

Later on the game slows down a bit, both as a natural consequence of having more cities with more to do, and because Civilization is very fond of showing you everything you’ve accomplished on that turn in minute detail. I’ve spoken of my love for Civilization’s City View before, and for good reason: it’s tremendously effective at making those single colour squares that represent your cities on the world map feel like actual places that you’ve built, and you’ll be transported there every time you build a new improvement or wonder, or when the population gets unruly and downs tools because you don’t have enough Elvis impersonators on hand.  Whenever you research a new technology you’re confronted with a full-screen description of the thing you just researched first, and then a summary of what it unlocks, which is a nice way of jamming some edutainment into the game². If you change government you’re informed of the new thematically-appropriate ruling council via a newspaper headline. The game is full of these little visual flourishes, likely in an attempt to compensate for the basic graphics on the world map and the city management screen, which is where you spend 90% of your time.

I was going to say that you’d never get away with this today, and that dragging the player around the game like this is a pretty big UI no-no for all that it adds to Civilization’s atmosphere. That would be a complete lie, however, seeing as how modern Civilizations are, if anything, even more pushy with grabbing the player away from whatever they were concentrating on and e.g. making them manually reroute eight trade routes and place three spies every few turns. So if we’re going to do this, Firaxis, can we at least spend the time looking at something worthwhile instead of a trade route dialogue? The connection with the game world as an actual world is something that recent 4Xes are in danger of losing touch with completely; I’ve spoken of my dislike for Endless Space reducing its colonies to a bunch of numbers, and Civilization has been headed down the same route for a while. It would be nice if Firaxis used their utter disregard for UI norms to build a more robust context around your civilisation and lend it more of a sense of place.

Another thing that struck me about the original Civilization that’s been lost in the more modern iterations: the tech tree is a genuine tech tree instead of a collection of anaemic tech sticks. You can research Explosives without ever having discovered Masonry or Bronze Working. Once you’ve worked your way up to the highest levels of the tree you start building the spaceship, and Civilization’s approach to it is, in my opinion, far superior to any other Civilization game (save 2, whose spaceship is a direct copy of this one). Instead of having ten individual spaceship components with glacial build times resulting in a mind-numbingly repetitious hammering of the “End Turn” button, Civilization has you building up a spaceship out of a set of small parts which are relatively quick to produce, but which you have to build multiple copies of. The full spaceship requires 12 SS Modules, 12 SS Components and 40-odd SS Structures; you can launch with fewer than this if you’re pressed for time and are happy with scoring fewer points at the end of the game, but I prefer building the full thing. The build time for the complete spaceship is approximately the same as in later editions of Civilization, but because it’s parcelled up into smaller chunks like this you feel like you’re making concrete progress towards its completion — more than that, you can see it taking shape in orbit, piece by piece. Again, it’s something that feels far more satisfying to build than the spaceship in Civilization 6, where you don’t get to see the fruits of your actions and the game ends as soon as you hit the “Launch” button so you don’t get to see it fly, either.

In just about every 4X I can think of there’s been a tension between two major strategies: building up a relatively small number of super-cities with high resource outputs, otherwise known as “going tall”, or eschewing city development in favour of cranking out Settler units to expand as fast as possible by founding new cities on every available scrap of land, otherwise known as “going wide”. Ideally you do a bit of both and try to balance the two approaches, but the first Civilization games were infamous for the phenomenon of “infinite city sprawl”, or ICS, which should tell you a little something about how successful the early efforts to discourage going wide were. In fact, until I did this replay of Civilization I thought that was actually intentional, and that it wasn’t until later that designers realised micromanaging an empire of thirty cities could get a bit tedious. However, it turns out it does make an attempt to stop the player from gobbling up virgin territory and AI empires alike via two mechanisms that have been absent from Civilization for at least a decade: government types and their interaction with city corruption.

When you start a game of Civilization your empire is ruled by you (obviously) as dictator at the head of a Despotic government. You have to research other government types and the closest alternatives — Monarchy and The Republic — are a few rungs up the tech tree, so in your early expansion phase you’re stuck with Despotism. This isn’t such a bad thing, though, as Despotism offers free unit support costs; in Civilization units are supported with production (and in the case of Settlers food as well) rather than money, and so building up the initial Settlers you need to expand and develop your empire and the military you’ll need to defend yourself from marauding barbarians would be crippling at this early stage if you didn’t have Despotism. Even Despotism comes with a catch, in that each city only gets free support for a number of units that’s equal to that city’s size, and if you build more than that you have to start paying production. Given that production is quite hard to come by in Civilization, this can flatline your cities if you expand too fast and crank out too many units. So even the government type that’s specifically intended to aid early expansion has a natural brake on going too fast: you have to wait until a city reaches size 3 or 4 before it’s properly useful to your empire in terms of building and supporting units.

Corruption on the other hand actively siphons off money and production from your cities. Your capital has zero corruption, but subsequent cities will have increasing levels of corruption the further they are from your capital. Expansion may be comparatively cheap under Despotism, but Despotism experiences rampant corruption and pretty soon any new cities you found will have the majority of their resources consumed by it. This is an incredibly negative mechanic that I instinctively dislike (since it makes founding a new city feel awful when 80% of its resources are sucked away by corruption) and which was removed from the game in Civilization 4 for good reason, but it’s undeniably effective and almost works in Civilization. The idea is that you’re incentivised to upgrade from Despotism to Monarchy/The Republic by two things: first is that Despotism has a cap on the resources that you can gather from city tiles that gets removed when you change to any other government type, and second is that Monarchy and The Republic are both less corrupt forms of government. The flipside is that you’ll have to start paying full support costs for your units (even Monarchy doesn’t give you any free ones) but once your empire has developed to a certain point this will be outweighed by the boost you get from more resources and less corruption. Switching too early, on the other hand, can really throw a spanner in the works as the production costs of supporting units are far higher than the savings you get from the new government type.

This is a very good design idea. Figuring out when exactly you should switch away from Despotism to The Republic, and then from there to Democracy (which has its own drawbacks) is supposed to have balances and tradeoffs and make the player think carefully about when exactly to make the switch. Unfortunately Civilization shoots itself in the foot here thanks to its boardgame nature; it likes these very powerful, simple mechanics but doesn’t fully think through what’ll happen when people play the game for thousands of hours instead of running through it once or twice and then putting it back into the cupboard. The problem has two parts. One is the Democracy government type, which (somewhat naively) completely eliminates corruption and gives a significant trade boost to your empire, in exchange for extreme penalties for doing anything military. You’re supposed to switch to Democracy once your expansion phase is over and you want to start building your cities tall, which is why it’s situated halfway along the tech tree and should in theory take some time to get to, during which you’ll have to labour under one of the lesser forms of government and deal with the resulting corruption, slowing your expansion. By the time you switch to it the AI empires should have built up a decently threatening army and the military penalty Democratic civilizations receive should therefore be somewhat meaningful.

Unfortunately the Pyramids wonder — available after researching Masonry, one of the very first advances available — lets you use any government type even if you’ve not unlocked it yet. This means that you can switch to Democracy around 1500BC if you’re beelining for it, and while you take the intended production hit for unit support it’s massively outweighed by both the turbocharged growth your cities experience as the food restrictions on city tiles are lifted, and the trade boost that lets you simply buy anything you can’t produce, as well as boosting your science well beyond what it should be at this stage of the game. This lets you spam Settlers with wild abandon until you’ve filled every nook and cranny of your continent, at which point you can briefly switch to Communism to beat the shit out of your nearest neighbour with a technologically advanced military and take their space, and then back to Democracy again. There’s no other restrictions or penalties for expansion in Civilization — no spiralling technology costs, no happiness penalties, no maintenance — which is why the very first installment of the series ended up with empires that sprawled across the entire surface of the planet. It’s the optimal way to play.

Still, given that the Civilization series has spent the last twenty-eight years grappling with this problem and still hasn’t come up with an adequate solution, I’m not going to hold Civilization’s failure to do so against it. It’s interesting enough to discover that it was aware of the ICS problem from the outset and took steps to try and govern it, even if those steps were flawed. Anyway, there’s a bunch of other weirdnesses in the game that date it far more thoroughly, from the utter failure of the AI players to respect territory boundaries — they’ll happily park themselves right outside your cities, preventing you from working the tiles, and there’s no option to tell them to sod off — to there being no way to initiate diplomatic contact with other empires; you have to wait for them to come to you. That and the primitive interface make Civilization a bit too painful to play compared to Civilization 2, which is the same game with the rough edges sanded off.

I do think that there’s a lot to learn from the way Civilization handles world-building, though, and its generally positive (if somewhat privileged) attitude towards the that world. It’s a game that celebrates humanity’s achievements and which looks towards the future with an optimistic view that seems very out of place in the cynical landscape of 2019. You can cure cancer in Civilization. You can contact aliens by building the SETI wonder. And yes, you can build a spaceship and colonise other worlds, which is actually shown in the goddamn ending sequence here rather than the game instantly ending when you launch the spaceship. It’s a very outward-looking game, which is refreshing in this era of constant navel-gazing via the internet and social media. Given that this is so remarkable when the Civilization series is still going strong (there’s an expansion pack for Civilization 6 coming out next month, in fact) is a pretty damning indictment of how recent incarnations of Civilization have chosen to portray that broad sweep of human history — but I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, let’s just say that OG Civilization is a product of its time, but that’s precisely why I still find it fascinating almost three decades later; the difference in its approach and outlook is rather stark when compared to almost any modern 4X, and for me that ensures it avoids being reduced to a mere historical curio. Few other games from 1991 can say the same.

The post Civilization Through The Ages: Civilization appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I found myself cranking through yet another game of Civilization V the other day and a thought crystallised in my brain that’s been niggling me ever since I started playing it back in 2010: for a game that is based so much around cities and the civilizations built from them, a city in Civ V is a staggeringly two-dimensional entity. Open up the city screen for your capital and all you’ll see is a big list of numbers, symbols and building names. Open up the city screen for your newest colony and you’ll see exactly the same thing; the numbers might be smaller and the lists shorter, but there’s nothing to really differentiate the two as entities apart from the name. Cities in Civ V exist purely as resource gathering and production nodes, and while this is certainly how they are supposed to function mechanically I feel that the game loses something for not having them feel like places.

It was not always thus.

These days the original Civilization is an astoundingly clunky experience. It’s not actively painful to play, but there are a lot of ancient mechanics that make me wish I was playing one of the newer iterations in the series. Settler units being responsible for terrain improvements. Food and shield upkeep for military units. The horrible, horrible combat system that cannot be trusted. Mechanically speaking it was showing its age ten years ago, and today it is quite literally a museum piece that’s almost only worth playing as a historical curio. Despite this, though, I do keep revisiting Civilization once every couple of years, and it’s entirely down to one thing: the city view.

Look at a typical gameplay screen from Civilization. The visuals are fairly basic, even for a game from 1991; there’s very little time devoted to artistic flourishes aside from some animated waves sloshing around the coastlines, and otherwise every single visual detail is there because it communicates some kind of mechanical information – tile types, resources, improvements and so on. It’s the same problem facing Civ V’s city screens, albeit one imposed by the technology of the time and the limited resources of a small development team rather than bad design. However, there’s a big difference in the approach each game takes to its rather stark portrayal of game information. Civ V prefers to ignore the problem of its lifeless cities, and hopes you’ll be able to draw some sense of atmosphere from the world map and the emergent narrative at the core of every Civilization game. The original Civilization on the other hand – which, let us remember, was made nineteen years earlier — attempts to tackle it head-on.

A city in Civilization is represented by this horrible square graphic which is designed to pack in the city’s vital statistics and nothing else. Click on the city and you get the familiar lists of numbers, albeit presented in a visual style that I happen to think is actually more effective than that used in Civilization V (I especially like coins and bulbs being represented as actual stacks of coins and bulbs rather than a coin or a beaker with a number next to it). There’s also a little line of figures along the top of the screen that represents your assorted citizenry, and if this were all Civilization bothered to do I think it’d already be taking a superior approach to injecting some life into the city screen through actually portraying your citizens as people rather than an abstract number or a little coloured circle.

Civilization doesn’t stop there, though. On the city screen interface is this button marked “View” which, when clicked, takes you to this wonderful panoramic cartoon view of your city. It must have taken ages to implement since it contains what are by far the most detailed graphics and animations in the game, and to their credit the Microprose development team made very effective use of it since it’s not just a static representation of the city in question. When you found a city with a settler unit you get a cutscene where the settlers drive up to the city site in their wagons and build some huts. While all the buildings you have built are represented somewhere in the city and can be viewed at any time, when you build them you’re treated to a little scene where it materialises in place which gives you a feeling of having accomplished more than adding 10% to the city’s gold output. Building a wonder is even better, since these are ridiculously huge structures that really stand out in the bijou depiction of the city view (the Colossus in particular is great, since all you can see are the statue’s feet). When the citizens of a particular city are unhappy they’ll march through the streets with pitchforks and torches or – later on – placards and signs. When you invade an opponent’s city you get to see an animation of your military forces doing the same, which is a nice excuse to show you what it is you just managed to capture.

So the city view isn’t just a more detailed picture of your city (this is where Civs 2 and 3 went horribly, horribly wrong), but is also used in as many situations as the developers can think of to add a sense of place to the game that’s sorely lacking from what you spend most of your time looking at in the world map. The view even updates from time to time as you advance technologically, with the wooden huts and dirt roads being replaced by skyscrapers and tarmac and your soldiers progressing from legionaries to musketeers to modern infantry. Even the bog-standard citizens stood out front will update, and there’s unique graphics for nobles, entertainers, tax collectors and scientists. The game does this in a few other places too, with the terrifying Sid Meier-analogue philosopher eventually being replaced by a scientist wearing a lab coat, and your advisors changing their appearance with time as well as with successive government types, but it’s in the city screen that this change is most striking.

This one seemingly-cosmetic feature does much to imbue Civilization’s cities with a sense of liveliness that’s missing from the sequels¹. Civ V’s cities will visibly grow on the world map and the odd world wonder will show up outside them when you start construction, but otherwise one city looks much like another. Managing to build a wonder on the higher difficulty levels is a rare event, and so the game can’t rely on them to mark a city out as a distinct place. It has to do it through the features all cities have access to – their population and their improvements – and this is something that Civ V fails at in a rather abject manner, since both are barely represented on the world map.

From a game development perspective I can understand why this is so. Art assets are very expensive to produce, and coding non-interactive elements just to fulfil a sense of atmosphere is rightly seen as something of a lesser priority than, say, getting the AI to behave in a rational and sane manner.² What Civilization does with its city view is also a big no-no in modern game design; jerking the player away from what they’re doing and shoving them into what amounts to a cutscene at the end of every turn is something that I probably wouldn’t look too kindly on if I saw it in a modern game.³ Still, I can’t help but think that Civilization regresses slightly with each new iteration; lessons learned during the design and development of the previous games are jettisoned, ignored, or simply not implemented due to lack of time and resources, and so each time I buy a new Civ game I’m struck by what is conspicuously missing rather than the brand new features the dev team spent hours laboriously coding. I accept that Civilization does have to iterate and come up with new design elements, and that Firaxis can’t just make the same game over and over again with prettier graphics, but I would have thought that atmospheric touches like the city view and the cultural unit appearances seen in Civ 4’s expansion packs would be universal across the entire series. A new game built on new technology is an opportunity to implement more of these; it is not an excuse to toss out old ones. That’s something I think the designers at Firaxis would do well to remember as their recent games (including XCOM) have been particularly afflicted by this peculiar brand of amnesia, and it’s made them substantially less than they would have been had they kept their past firmly in mind.

————————————————————————-

The post In Praise Of: Civilization’s City View. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Note before we start: “4X” is an acronym invented by a moron for the same reason that the term “FPS” was inserted into the general gaming lexicon: because calling games “Doom clones” and “Civ-alikes” is seen as demeaning to the ones that might actually be trying to iterate and develop a genre. Genre labels are necessary; the term 4X, however, is spectacularly awful, standing as it does for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. I sometimes wonder if the bored gaming journalist/PR bod who came up with it ever regrets this most enduring of their contributions to gaming culture. Whatever. We’re stuck with it now.

If you cast your eye back over the last decade or so of strategy titles, you might notice that the 4X genre is littered with the corpses of dead and dying space-based empire building games. Some of them have been badly made buggy messes (Sword of the Stars 2, for example). Some of them have had a limited amount of impact but are ultimately fading away into obscurity (Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire). Even though the last year has seen an extraordinary number of these titles released – I can probably count at least five off the top of my head –  only one of them has had any staying power to my mind, and Endless Space is a game with many of its own problems.

Perhaps this isn’t that unusual. I’d expect sci-fi to be a popular setting for games because it requires even less thought than fantasy; you can basically do a hundred iterations of “Modern day thing X, but in the FUTURE” and then call it a day. But why the 4X genre in particular? Compared to sci-fi settings you can count the number of fantasy 4X games on one hand, and I think even historical real-world settings (which are largely propped up by Paradox’s prolific output) are outnumbered by sci-fi ones. This cornucopia of sci-fi games doesn’t exist in a vacuum, though. They exist for a reason. They’re trying to recapture and/or recreate the spirit and feel of an ancient classic. They’re trying to do Master of Orion 2 all over again.

God, that was a convoluted intro, wasn’t it? Ten months of writing and I’m still no better at them. Anyway. Master of Orion 2! (Or MOO 2 as everyone refers to it in yet another silly acronym, although I suppose this time it really can’t be helped.) That gaggle of sci-fi 4X hopefuls might not be consciously trying to replicate MOO, but the game will always be lurking somewhere near the shallow reefs of their collective psyche like some kind of gargantuan Nautilus. And the reason for this is that – despite being released way back in 1996 – Master of Orion 2 is still the epitome of the space-based side of the genre¹. Think of a feature that one of the new breed offers, and the chances are that MOO did it better sixteen years ago using dark age technology. It’s still the game to beat. No contemporary title has yet managed to do so.

To answer the question of why this is, it’s worth looking at MOO’s own roots. These lead us by a rather short and circuituous route back to the fantasy genre: Master of Orion was an attempt to do Master of Magic, but in space, and it cannibalises many of its ancestor’s gameplay mechanics wholesale. For example, here is a picture of Master of Magic’s town management screen, followed by a picture of Master of Orion’s colony management screen:

They’re almost identical. If Master of Magic had a good idea — and it was a game that was full to bursting with good ideas — then Master of Orion stole it and made it better. This leads to some gameplay mechanics that seem a bit weird in context (wandering heroes that can be hired to command your fleets and solar systems, random encounters with monsters like space dragons etc.) but which actually fulfil the same gameplay roles they did in MoM and make everything flow much better as a result. MoM provided a very strong base upon which to build, and I think proves that it’s perfectly okay to look outside your niche for new ideas rather than just considering what would work in the context of the game you’re trying to make.

That’s not to say that Master of Orion didn’t introduce good ideas of its own that were specific to its setting.  The diplomacy options were rather standard for the time but benefited greatly for having an animated ambassador for whatever race you were talking to show up on the holographic batphone accompanied by their theme music; the same went for whenever you discovered/stole/looted a tech and the appropriate representative of your scientific researchers/sneaky spies/military forces showed up to tell you what you’d managed to get your hands on. This was great for really emphasising that the races were different as you were presented with a visual reminder of what you looked like and what they looked like every time you talked to them. It even extended to the colony management screen, with newly-conquered solar systems being full of tiny ant-men or rock-things rather than whatever race you’d happened to pick for that game. It was world-building touches like this that imbued MOO with a sense of personality far beyond what (for example) Galactic Civilizations’ static portraits and cookie-cutter ship design was capable of communicating to the player.

MOO’s research is an interesting attempt to produce a system in which different empires can go down genuinely different paths of development. There are eight different fields of research – physics, biology, sociology and so on – each of which has roughly 8-10 tiers. Each tier has up to three technologies you can research by investing the required number of research points generated by your scientists and labs, but the catch is that you can only pick one of the techs on offer per tier in a given field² . The techs you don’t pick will disappear from your research options forever, and the only way to get at them after that point will be to trade for them with another race that did choose them. This makes technological research in MOO a process of genuine prioritisation rather than just deciding what order you’re going to research stuff in, and while there are some duff technologies (anything to do with spying, for instance) there’s also some rather tough decisions to be made. Sure, you could take Battlestations and beef up the space-based defences of your colonies, but that means missing out on Powered Armour for your ground assault troops. Are better fuel cells really worth missing out on improved missile technology for? I don’t know. That’s something you’ll have to figure out for yourself after considering what you need in the particular game you’re playing, but I really like that MOO forces you to choose one way or the other.

(A neat side-effect of the tech process is that other races often have dramatically different methods of waging warfare compared to you. MOO has provoked a nasty barrage of swearing more than once after I realised that the race fielding the apparently-undergunned battleships facing my top-of-the-line fleet had in fact invested their research points into the Transporters technology. Two turns later all my ships were crippled and burning as a result of the elite boarding parties rampaging through their interiors.)

MOO’s tech tree synergises very well with its ship design element, which as far as I’m concerned has yet to be bettered in any game. You have a number of stock ship classes – Destroyer, Cruiser, Battleship and so on – each of which has a certain amount of space available inside its hull that depends on its size. What you fill this space with is entirely up to you. There are no dedicated slots for guns or shields or anything like that; instead, every component in the game takes up a certain amount of space on the ship depending on what it is, and you can bolt whatever you want onto it as long as you don’t exceed the ship’s carrying capacity. If you want to transform a destroyer into a shoot-n’-scoot  missile boat it’s a simple matter of adding Fast Missile Racks and a swarm of two-shot nuke launchers. If you want a tank battleship to soak up damage you include the Reinforced Hull and Heavy Armour subsystems. Want to smash the enemy at range? A heavy Phasor array takes up a lot of space, but it’ll get the job done. Having trouble with enemy missiles and fighters? Those same Phasors can be configured as dedicated short-range Point Defence weapons with an associated reduction in their space cost. MOO’s ship design interface has dozens of different ship components on offer – all of which have to be researched as one of your dedicated options in the tech tree – and is astonishingly flexible as a result. The chances are that if you can think of a ship concept you can build a decent analogue of it in the game. It’s fantastic, it really is.

Unfortunately – as with most things in gaming that give players a lot of latitude to come up with their own designs – the ship-building aspect of MOO was powergamed a long time ago for the optimum solution. While I’ve never done it myself I hear it’s possible to build a ship with a time warp and cloaking device that can literally never be hit by the enemy. This is sad, but by the late-game the flaws in MOO’s tactical combat are starting to become painfully apparent anyway. MOO does small-scale fleet engagements very well, and as long as there’s not more than a couple of ships on each side battles can be terrifically tense as each side tries to make the most of its limited firepower. As the fleet sizes scale up, though, the combat becomes increasingly braindead. Because it’s turn-based, and because it’s possible to equip your ships with weapons that can hit the enemy on the first turn of combat, battles are increasingly decided by which side gets to go first and obliterate the opposing fleet with a devastating alpha strike. At the very end of the game the fleets are so large that trying to deal with them becomes actively painful, and while the developers helpfully included an option to let the AI fight the battle for you while you go off to make a cup of tea or something the tactical combat is still the worst part of the game by far.

Finally there’s all the stuff that’s been tossed into the mix to game the game a sense of context and the stamp of its own personality. There’s the aforementioned wandering heroes who can be hired to dramatically improve the performance of your fleets and colonies, and the frankly bizarre monsters that seem like a joke until a single space eel picks one of your systems for its spawning ground, mashes all your destroyers to pulp and severely mauls three of your four flagship cruisers before they are able to escape, and these inject some much needed liveliness into the early-game routine of scouting out new worlds and colonising them.  There’s also the RPG-like custom race creation, where you’re given a limited number of points to spend on building your race out of a collection of positive and negative traits. However, I’m going to reserve my column inches for talking about the headline feature of the game: the Antaran raiding parties and the terrifying threat they represent to any empire that doesn’t have a healthy array of endgame tech to counter their obscene combat advantages.

Every so often a video will play showing an extradimensional incursion by the Antarans, an ancient and long-forgotten race of superassholes who have returned to pillage your burgeoning colonies for no other reason than that they’re massive, massive dicks.  You watch this video, and then when it’s done you notice the dashed red line on the map that indicates a hostile fleet approaching one of your systems. You click on the fleet. It consists of two measly destroyers. Chortling, you take advantage of the Antarans’ slow travel time to amass your own fleet in orbit around the threatened colony. Soon the system is occupied by numerous destroyers, a few cruisers and perhaps even a battleship or two if you’ve managed to build them at this stage, backed up by a star base in orbit around the colony and missile batteries on the planet itself. More than enough to see off the threat of two destroyers, you think, even if they have been built by a hyper-advanced uber-race. Sheer weight of numbers has to count for something here, after all, and how much damage can two destroyers really do?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. The long lead time you had to prepare for the raid wasn’t because the Antaran ships are just that slow, it’s because they were intentionally dragging their feet so that you’d turn their killzone into a target-rich environment. They have particle beams that one-shot your destroyers and tear through your cruisers’ armour like paper. The battleships are crippled and destroyed by gravity waves, and while the star base and planetary batteries desperately barrage the enemy with wave after wave of missiles they only manage to chip the tiniest slivers of armour away from the Antaran ships. In almost no time at all your fleet has been crushed and the planetary defences levelled, and the Antarans proceed to bomb the planet until no life remains on its surface. If you want a colony here in the future you’re going to have to start from scratch.

The Antarans are at least fairly egalitarian in their dickishness, preying on each empire more-or-less evenly, but at the start of the game there’s nothing you can do to resist an Antaran attack. Your tech is simply too primitive to cope with it; it’s the classic Civ scenario of spearman versus tank, except this time the tank always wins.  Whenever you see that red dashed line terminating in one of your inhabited systems, your best bet is to evacuate everything mobile from the area and let them have their fun while you first research bigger guns and better armour, and then eventually find a way to assault the Antaran pocket dimension and end the threat permanently. Doing so wins you the game, the argument here being that if you have a fleet that can take on the Antaran homeworld and win then beating the other empires back in real space isn’t going to be much of a problem for you.

The thing I like about this goal of beating the Antarans is that it’s both organic and constantly visible rather than being some far-off thing you’ll take care of when you hit the endgame. The dimensional portal technology that gets you access to the Antaran homeworld becomes available during the midgame, and after you’ve built the dimensional gate you can send off a fleet to try and wreck the place at any time. You probably won’t win, but it’s always there as an option for you to try whenever you feel like it. Probably you’ll want to wait until you have Doom Stars plated in Adamantium Armour and armed with a Stellar Converter or two, but it is possible to beat the Antarans with Phasor-armed Titans (at least on the lower difficulties) if you’re crazy enough, or have simply had enough of the constant Antaran raids wrecking your outlying systems.  As with so much in Master of Orion the timing of your little Ragnarok is entirely up to you.

I think that’s where most of the successor games have gone wrong, really; they’ve tried to do Master of Orion, but because they have to work with more advanced tech where assets take far more time to finish and implement than they did in the past they haven’t even begun to reproduce the amount of choice available in MOO. They’ve been forced to straitjacket the player through necessity, with the result that every single subsequent game I’ve played – even Endless Space, with its vast and sprawling tech tree – has seemed limited in some way compared to Master of Orion. That they also fail to inject their games with even half the personality of MOO is more of a personal failing on their part, and one which reflects a prevailing attitude in development to treat worldbuilding as a secondary consideration rather than a major hook that drags players into the game and doesn’t let them go.

And this is a bit odd to me, because Master of Orion isn’t perfect. As excellent as it is there’s definite room for improvement, and I would be very happy if somebody simply approached the genre from the same general direction while tightening up some of the flabbier elements of the game such as the tactical combat and the dated colony UI. It’s been sixteen years, though, and that game still doesn’t exist, so at this point I’m going to have to conclude it’s never going to. And in lieu of a genuine successor game I have to say that Master of Orion still beats its modern competitors hands-down. UI aside it’s barely aged in a decade and a half; whether that’s a particular quality of MOO or a general indictment of the genre I can’t really say, but in a way I can’t help but be happy it’s still as fresh to me as it was when I first played it all those years ago.

Master of Orion 2 is available in a double-pack with the original on Good Old Games for the low low price of just six bucks.

—————————————————————–

The post In Praise Of: Master Of Orion 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Really I should just rename this column the Microprose Nostalgia Hour, because that’s what it is now.

Darklands! Darklands is a really interesting game for a number of reasons. For starters, going back and playing it today is like visiting the Lost World; it’s an RPG that was made long before Bioware had had a chance to stamp the western market with their own particular brand of straitjacketed game design, and represents a fascinating glimpse into what might have been had they not gotten their grubby little hands all over the industry. Darklands is twenty years old at this point, and has a ruleset that is consciously and purposely designed for a computer game. Its age means that it has some genuinely archaic features — mostly relating to the UI and combat commands — which I’m sure would have been thrown out or improved as technology moved on. The ruleset on the other hand is almost perfectly byzantine, requiring the services of a 120 page cluebook¹ to properly understand. Darklands does not fuck around when it comes to rules and mechanics. Here, look at this character stat screen:

That’s six attributes and nineteen different skills along with lists of known saints and alchemy formulas. It’s an awful lot to keep track of at first, and you’d be forgiven for bouncing off of Darklands at the first attempt². However, that big list of numbers and abbreviations enables a game system that is by turns stunningly innovative and incredibly responsive. I’ve not ever seen anything else quite like Darklands in the intervening twenty years. It puts a high premium on realism and logic over gamey mechanics, and it’s precisely because a lot of things in Darklands happen exactly as you’d expect them to in the real world that it seems so fresh and new each time I play it. I’ve become conditioned to expect games to act like games, and for the events that take place within them to happen according to game logic that’s become so rarefied and specialised at this point that it might as well describe the back end of the moon.

You want an example of this? Look no further than the game’s armour system. There are five levels of armour in the game, ranging from leather to chain to plate mail.  There are something like thirty different weapon types in seven different categories, and every single one of those weapons has an associated armour penetration level. When you make an attack with a given weapon, you only do full damage if the penetration of the weapon exceeds the armour value of the target’s armour. If it doesn’t? Then it sucks to be you; you’re almost completely out of luck because that reduces the amount of damage you inflict by seven eighths. And that’s rounding down, too, so anything less than eight is reduced to zero.

At a stroke this one mechanic changes the entire nature of the game. Because armour behaves more or less the way you’d expect it to in reality it means that attacking a heavily-armoured knight with a glorified stick is going to be suicide every single time. Doesn’t matter how good you are with that stick, doesn’t matter if it’s a magic stick blessed by saintly powers, you’re simply not going to be able to inflict enough damage to take him down before he cleaves you in half with the huge two-handed sword he’s carrying. So if he’s passing you on the road and he asks you for a “toll”, you had better pay up unless you are carrying the appropriate can-opener and think you can best someone who has basically been trained for war since birth.

Armour is a genuine force multiplier rather than a simple static bonus; a character in full plate can face down three or four baddies while only taking minimal damage because the plate will soak most of it up. Plate doesn’t make them invincible, though, thanks to the way Darklands deals with character attributes. Attributes such as strength, charisma etc. are determined by the player during character generation by distributing a stock of character points, and then further modified depending on which careers you pick for them. After you’ve left the character generation screen those attributes are set in stone for the entire rest of the game. They cannot go up permanently, they can only be increased temporarily with alchemical potions. Worse, as your character ages your inherent attributes will actually start to decrease; characters past the age of thirty will begin to suffer permanent penalties to strength and endurance that are minor at first, but which gradually mount up as they get older and older until that character is combat ineffective and forced into retirement. Once you’ve started the game there’s plenty of scope for character improvement by increasing the nineteen different skills, either through using them or by being trained in them by somebody else, but the static attributes play a huge role in what you can and can’t do and drive you to make the most of them before the passage of time starts to slowly wear them away.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, but I wanted to explain just why plate isn’t a guarantee of victory when facing multiple opponents. First off, for every additional person attacking a target past the first one every person attacking that target gets a bonus to their hit probability. The target themselves gets a similar penalty. Much of Darklands is about positioning yourself so that your party can take on baddies in nice two-to-one ratios to make the most of this advantage, not to mention ensuring the baddies can’t do it to you. One man fighting four will always be at a disadvantage no matter how heavily armoured he is. Second, there are actually two stats that can take damage during combat: strength and endurance. Strength acts as both strength and hit points. Penetrating hits damage strength, and it cannot be restored except through resting, healers or potions. Damaging an opponent’s strength reduces their combat effectiveness since they’ll no longer be able to swing their weapon as easily.  Reducing it to zero kills them outright, so it’s by far the most important stat in the game. Endurance on the other hand represents a character’s stamina. Every single hit that successfully connects, whether it penetrates armour or not, has a chance to do a small amount of endurance damage. This does nothing until endurance is reduced to zero, at which point the poor unfortunate in question will collapse to the ground because they’re so knackered by all the fighting.

This doesn’t count as an immediate kill, but whoever wins the overall combat is assumed to do some surreptitious throat-slitting after the battle is done. If you win, any exhausted characters will get back on their feet seemingly none the worse for wear, while exhausted enemies mysteriously expire so that you can steal their pants. Endurance acts as a nice balancing aspect that gives poorly-equipped characters a small chance against heavily-armoured baddies. Unfortunately it also means that strength and endurance are by far the most important attributes in the game and that every character has to bulk up — even the cloistered nun at the back who is tagging along in case the party ever needs any divine intervention. Other attributes are good for certain character types – the party leader must have good charisma and Speak Common for negotiations and the alchemist needs high intelligence for mixing potions – but as a general rule you can get by with just one character having a high perception or charisma. It does sadly mean Darklands characters end up being a little bit identikit at the start of the game, for all that the plethora of skills allows for significant specialisation later.

Darklands is set in fifteenth century Germany, and its major conceit is that the world is exactly as the peasants of the time believed it to be. This means that alchemy works, saints and holy powers regularly intervene in earthly matters, and demons and witches are real threats that must be fought whenever they’re encountered. Alchemy and divine intervention make an interesting substitute for the traditional RPG magic system, while the enemies are pleasingly gothic spins on familiar tropes since they’re all rooted in the same common folklore. With such a plethora of evil beasties inhabiting the countryside, though, it makes travelling outside of the cities practically suicidal for a party that’s just starting out.  Instead, you begin the game by literally fighting crime. If you lurk around inside a city at nighttime and manage to avoid the guards enforcing curfew, there’s a high chance you’ll run into one or more groups of thieves who can be murdered in the cause of skilling up and their bodies stripped of loot to provide party funding.  Do this for a few nights and you’ll soon be competent enough at fighting to have at least a chance of survival outside the city. The next step is acquiring some good quality equipment, and once you’ve done that you can launch into Darklands’ raison d’etre: true open-world gameplay.

Darklands has no plot, you see. The game starts with your four characters swearing an oath to fight crime in a pub, and you progress from there onto bigger and better things quite naturally, but at no point does anyone give you directions about where to go or who to kill except in the most basic fashion as a part of randomly-generated quests. The point of Darklands is that you wander around this map of Germany doing heroic deeds and gathering fame while simultaneously trying to stay solvent (and this is harder than it sounds). Fame acts as the game’s score. Since it has no plot Darklands has no ending as we’ve come to traditionally understand them. Indeed, there are only two ways to have the game end at all: either have your party wiped out in a fight against something particularly nasty, or else go to the nearest inn and retire from adventuring. When you do this the game calculates your final fame and tells you how the world remembered you in the years following your retirement, but even this isn’t permanent; if you’re unhappy with the result you can come out of retirement and bash some more demon heads together for extra fame funbux.

The reason Darklands gets away with this – indeed, the reason why its open world approach ends up being so good – is because while it might not have a plot it does have a definite structure and progression to it as your party gradually grows in power. The harder tasks simply aren’t pointed out to you until you have sufficient fame, and this is generally enough to stop you from blundering into a raubritter’s castle or a dwarf-infested mine straight away (although you can still do those things if you really want to). It’s also aided considerably by its approach to all interactions that aren’t overworld travel or combat. Darklands uses a series of text adventure-like menus with gorgeous painted backdrops to represent these, which allowed the developers to implement just about any kind of scenario they wanted with a minimum of fuss. There are literally hundreds of encounter types in the game which vary by region and terrain and season and which ensure that Darklands never, ever gets old. It’s an amazingly flexible system and I’m staggered modern developers with limited resources always plump for godawful 2D engines that look like somebody ran the original Baldur’s Gate through a clothes mangler (hello, Avadon) instead of hiring a halfway competent artist to do the backdrops and implementing something like Darklands’ encounter system.

This is what gets me most about Darklands: that twenty years on nobody has even tried to do what Darklands did. RPGs have developed a prevailing orthodoxy in the intervening years which is in general hewn to very closely. Even indie developers don’t like to wander too far off the beaten track, preferring to ape AAA games instead of doing their own thing. Darklands uses an astonishingly powerful ruleset that allows for so much more variety than today’s RPGs, not to mention the fact that aside from some very frustrating archaic UI issues and the combat sounding like somebody brought Keyboard Cat back from the grave to do the effects the game basically hasn’t aged and will never age. Dosbox ensures it’ll run on modern computers for the foreseeable future, and I have every confidence it’ll look just as good and play just as well after another twenty years have gone by. That’s a relative assessment since it’s not like the game isn’t showing its age in the tactical combat and overworld segments, but that all happened early on and the game looks the same to me now as it did back in 2002. Grimrock proved there was still a huge appetite for old-school dungeon crawlers, so why don’t we resurrect a few more of the old classics?

Anyway, next time I review something and say “They should have done it like Darklands!” this is what I mean; go for variety and flexibility and static, good-looking art over complicated animations, linear encounters and a rigid, constrictive narrative structure. Darklands took GOG by storm when it was released on there a year or two back. There are still people out there who want to play this sort of thing. I’m one of them, but in the absence of anything better it was GoG who took my money for a game I’d already bought once. In light of this I can’t help but feel that indie developers in particular are missing a trick here; a Darklands-alike seems like it’d be a project that’d perfectly suit their limited resources since it’s all about doing as much as you can with as little as possible. We realised a long time ago that 3D for 3D’s sake wasn’t necessarily an improvement, so why do outfits like Spiderweb insist on doing a very poor imitation of late 90s isometric RPGs? The Darklands style is a perfect fit for their kind of text-heavy RPG, but instead I was forced to put up with awful graphics that were primarily there to service the needs of the not-very-good combat system. Indie games are supposed to appeal to the audiences that mainstream publishers ignore (again, Grimrock) so I don’t understand why so many of them shoot themselves in the foot like that.

Whatever. Just replace the last 2,500 words with “I want another Darklands, indie developers. You should get right on that,” and you’ll pretty much get the gist of what I’m trying to say here. The old adage is that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but here it rather depends on which bits you ignore. In Darklands’ case, it could do with a little bit of repetition.

1. That’s cluebook, not manual. The manual is as awesome as ever in terms of background information, but it’s deliberately vague on the actual calculations the game is crunching through to determine what happens when you swing your military pick at the raubritter’s head. The cluebook breaks all that stuff down in excruciating detail, and I think Darklands is a much better game when you actually understand what is going on.
2. As long as you go back to it at some point. If you don’t go back to it at all then rest assured that I will find you.

The post In Praise Of: Darklands. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Colonization, then. It looks like Civilization, it’s spelled like Civilization, it’s even controlled in a similar fashion to Civilization. In terms of the way it plays, though, it couldn’t be more different.

There’s no tech tree in Colonization, and no science rating. There’s no taxes (well, there are taxes, but they don’t go to you). No settlers. No city maintenance, no corruption, no happiness rating. In exchange for all of these things you get a relatively simple yet powerful economic system that forms pretty much the entire basis of the game. As a game about the colonisation of a new continent, focusing on the economy to the virtual exclusion of all else was the perfect way to emphasise just why people would voyage over thousands of miles of Atlantic ocean to settle in a strange new world: land, money and resources.

It’s this last one that provides the driving force for the first half of the game. Like Civilization, you start a game of Colonization with just a handful of units. You have a basic caravel for making landfall and for sustaining your initial trade links with Europe. On that caravel are a soldier for fending off unfriendly natives and a free colonist armed with tools, ready to strike the earth and found a new colony in the location of your choosing. Where exactly that location is is going to depend almost entirely on the resources surrounding it. Unlike Civilization you don’t get to work the “fat cross” of tiles around a town. Instead you just get the nine tiles immediately next to it. This makes good colony placement even more important than Civ; you have to pick a site where those nine tiles provide everything a growing colony needs. Food to keep the colonists alive. Wood to construct buildings and develop your industry. And – not essentially, but very definitely preferably – some form of cash crop that you can cultivate trade with Europe to buy new colonists and new equipment to expand your colonial venture.

Aside from food in the form of crops and fish, there are five types of raw resource in Colonization: wood, ore, tobacco, cotton, sugar and furs. Forest squares hold wood and furs, hills and mountains provide ore, while the cash crops are to be found on the plains and savannah of America. When you found a colony you’ll get the usual basic resources from the colony square, plus one colonist – the one that founded it — that you can put to work in any way you choose, either gathering one of these resource types from the surrounding environment or processing them in one of the colony’s buildings. Wood is cut from trees by colonists working outside the colony walls, and then turned into raw production by others working in the carpenter’s workshop. Fur pelts hunted from the local wildlife are made into lovely coats at the fur trader’s house. Similar two-step chains exist for tobacco (cigars), sugar (rum) and cotton (cloth); the sole exception is the ore chain. Ore is smelted into tools at the blacksmith’s shop, and tools are very, very useful. Tools are used to equip pioneers to cut forests, drive roads and plow farms around the colony. You cannot build any kind of advanced building inside it with expending some tools. Finally, tools themselves may be used by a gunsmith to construct a third good: muskets. These aren’t so important at the start of the game, but good god are they critical to the end of it.

The point of Colonization’s economy is that you can at any time load any or all of these goods onto a boat and send them back to Europe to be sold in the markets there. The raw form of the resources gets you enough to live on at first, but the processed forms like cigars and rum are where the real money is to be made. The cash you get from this is your sole source of income, used for everything from rush-buying buildings to bribing educated specialists to make the trip over from the Old World so that they can live in a hovel in the new one. At the start of the game when you don’t have the industry to produce them yourself, money is used to purchase tools, muskets and horses from Europe. You can also buy more ships to transport a higher volume of goods — the starting caravel can carry a measly two slots’ worth, while an expensive galleon will do six and travel faster to boot – and even warships to protect your trade from the inevitable predations of the other colonial powers. The amount of money you have is the key brake on how fast you can expand. Colonies can be founded by any type of colonist without tools or any other special equipment, but it’s not much use if you can’t adequately populate it.

Speaking of population, the way Colonization deals with this is (I think) particularly neat. If one of your colonies manages to stockpile 200 food a new colonist will be born, but this barely ever happens until you’ve built yourself up a bit as a colonial empire. The real driving force behind your expansion will be immigration from Europe. Every so often a new immigrant colonist will arrive at the European docks, languishing there until you send over a boat to bring them to your rich new land of opportunity and adventure. Exactly what sort of immigrant you get is pretty much random, at first – anything from a dignified Elder Statesman to a wretched Petty Criminal who has been sentenced to penal transportation for his transgressions – but the key thing about these colonists is that they are “free”. You can pay to import specialists but the cheapest ones run a whopping 600-900 gold, and the most useful cost anywhere up to two thousand, making this impractical to do frequently. Most of your colonist workforce is going to be made up of these hopeful immigrants who just turn up on the dock, and the driving force behind their appearance is religious unrest in the mother country.

One of the first buildings you can construct in a newly-founded colony is a church. Stick a colonist in this church, and he’ll start producing crosses. If the colonist is a Firebrand Preacher, he’ll produce double. If you upgrade the church to a cathedral you get even more crosses. The crosses represent religious freedom in the new world, and make moving there a rather attractive prospect to any Puritan or Huguenot sick and tired of being persecuted by the state.  Bank enough crosses and an immigrant will move to the docks from the colonist pool. The total number of crosses needed to attract an immigrant increases each time so it doesn’t remain quite so easy to attract fresh blood. Building up your churches and preachers are therefore absolutely crucial for creating this constant stream of religious refugees.

The only problem with this approach is that you can often end up with a colony full of undesirable persons like criminals and indentured servants. These colonist types do well at gathering raw resources from the fields and mines, but they’re utterly terrible at any sort of intelligent work like processing those raw goods into something useful. You have two options for dealing with this.

1)      Ship all your undesirables off to the slave mines in the pestilent swampy interior of the continent, with their only contact with the outside world being the wagon train that picks up silver from the camp once in a blue moon . This is my preferred approach.

2)      Educate them into something useful.

This second approach takes a lot of time and effort. First you have to build a schoolhouse, then a college, then a university. Then you have to assign a specialist or three to the university to teach there. While they’re doing this they can’t do anything else useful for the colony, effectively functioning as so many extra mouths to feed. It also takes a while for education to produce results, depending on the level of educational establishment you’ve built. Eventually, though, any petty criminals present in the colony will be transformed through the power of education into indentured servants. Indentured servants in turn become unspecialised free colonists. And free colonists can learn the speciality of any of the specialists teaching at the university.

Education is something you are going to want to do sooner or later as your colonies improve and more and more native free colonists are born into the population. Free colonists can do any job, but they don’t excel at anything in particular. In order to make them genuinely useful you have to give them a specialty, and there are only two ways of doing this: either send them to an Indian village to learn a trade from the natives (more on this in a bit), or else educate them up using the specialist teacher-free colonist student method. It seems like a lot of time and effort to go to but specialists produce twice the number of goods in their speciality compared to basic free colonists – so an Expert Lumberjack will cut ten wood where a free colonist would only produce five – and so they’re essential for both making your colonies as efficient as possible and also circumventing that horrendous premium you pay back in Europe for attracting skilled specialists. It might cost you 1900 gold for that first Elder Statesman, but once you have him locked in your university he can educate any free colonists present into more Elder Statesmen.  Native-taught skills can also be hard to find since a given village will only teach a skill once, and so education allows you to disseminate that skill amongst your general population.

Once you’ve overcome the initial problem of founding the first few colonies and getting your economy going, the conflict and challenge of Colonization stems from two different sources. The first of these are the native inhabitants of the new world, who are already populating it very densely. This country is theirs. Not yours. Theirs. You can find native villages every seven or eight tiles or so which underline this fact. Your little band of colonists is encroaching on their land, and while they might start out friendly — giving you the land you initially settle on and occasionally sending small gifts of furs and sugar — any further expansion and development of their land runs the severe risk of pissing them off. If you settle next to an Indian village and want to use the tiles next to it to produce resources, you have to pay the resident Indians for their land or face a potential uprising that will easily wipe out your incipient colony. They outnumber you, even though you have guns and they don’t, and so they are best treated with a very light hand to begin with.

Later on, though, even if you’ve tried to keep on the natives’ good side, the demands of developing your colony to its fullest potential ensures that things will get ugly sooner or later. If you’re a complete dick you can systematically eradicate and enslave the native population surrounding your colony, but this requires a substantial military buildup that costs you time, money and manpower. The other option is to buy them off with regular deliveries of guns and booze, which still leaves me feeling tainted despite being the “good” choice. One way or the other you end up destroying their culture and their civilization to make way for yours, for no other reason than that they happen to be in the way. Colonization may have sidestepped the issue of slavery but it does do a good job of making you feel like a shit about the destruction of an entire people.

(One of the reasons the 2008 remake sucks so much is that the natives happily hand over their villages without a fight if you haven’t antagonised them, removing any hint of necessary conflict with the native peoples and sanitising the entire experience.)

The second threat to your burgeoning colonial government is the mother country itself. At first everything is hunky-dory; they’ve rid themselves of unwanted members of their population, you’re selling them dead animal skins and drugs and shit, everybody is happy. Eventually, though, the King of the country in question will start to do this:

Taxes! They are in the game but they are a decidedly bad thing. The King starts raking in a take off the top of every single bit of income you make selling goods to Europe. He won’t just implement one tax, either; instead he’ll hit you with tax after tax after tax until you’re forking over 40-60% of your money to him after every sale. Remember when I said that your money supply was the main brake on your colony expansion? The taxes make it even worse. Combined with market prices that fluctuate in response to supply and demand (so flooding the market with Rum will drive Rum prices into the ground) it can make things intolerable for you. Eventually your only option will be to throw off the tyrannical yoke of the King – and all his taxes – and declare independence.

There are two major barriers to doing this, though. First is that you need to get a sufficient number of your population to support a bid for independence. The colonists you star the game with? Those are Tories. They support the King. Everyone else who comes over from Europe is also a Tory who supports the King. In order to foment a dissenting opinion you need to stick Elder Statesmen into your town halls to produce liberty bells, which are Colonization’s way of representing rebel propaganda. Liberty bells do two things: they attract “great” people into your Continental Congress (the quotation marks are there because some of these people were demonstrably monsters) who provide empire-wide bonuses like not having to pay the Indians for their land any more, and they also slowly convert the population into members of the Sons of Liberty. The Sons of Liberty are a group who would be labelled as a terrorist organisation if they existed today, but in Colonization you want as many people to be members as possible. If 50% of a colony belongs to the Sons, they get a production bonus. If 100% of a colony are members they get an even larger production bonus. Producing liberty bells both puts you on the path to independence and maximises your economy to the fullest extent possible. Once 50% of your entire population joins the Sons of Liberty you can declare independence.

Of course the King isn’t going to take this lying down. He has a small army sitting on your doorstep – the Royal Expeditionary Force – and the turn after you declare independence they’ll land on your coastline and start invading your colonies. The regulars and dragoons making up the REF are the equal of your very best colonial forces, and they get a passive bonus for attacking colonies to boot. The only way to take them on is to fight them in the countryside where your forces’ familiarity with the surrounding countryside gives you a passive bonus. You’re also going to need an awful lot of guns, which is why industrial-scale musket production comes in rather handy at this point. My battles for independence usually see me starting out with a core of Veteran soldiers but quickly deteriorate into me handing a gun to colonists conscripted from the fields and churches.  Because of the way combat in Colonization works – probably the game’s single weak point – it’s numbers that will carry the day, not the quality of your troops or their positioning or anything like that, which is why the ability to create a soldier using any colonist and fifty muskets comes in rather handy.

Eventually this huge war of attrition will end one way or another; either the REF will take all your coastal colonies, cutting off your ability to continue trade with Europe, or you’ll succeed in exterminating every last one of the REF’s land forces. Either results in a game over, but winning the war of independence understandably confers a rather large score bonus when the game determines how well you did, naming an object after you depending on how future generations perceive your performance. Then you start fretting that you probably could have expanded some more, made more use of the land, declared independence earlier. Then you start a new game. That’s the curse of Colonization; it is, if anything, more addictive than Civilization if you’re interested in the time period at all (and if you’re not the game will get you interested), and it’s aged far more gracefully to boot.  I’m sure it’ll show up on GoG sooner or later, but for now you can download the DOS version from here and use it with DOSbox. You might end up losing days of your life to it, but I guarantee you won’t regret it.

The post In Praise Of: Colonization. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Sitting on my desk just across from me is my copy of the original Civilization manual. It’s a relic of a bygone age: 129 pages long; written in a single language meaning all 129 pages are relevant; and just chock-full of information about how best to play the game. Twenty years ago this is what manuals for complex strategy games like Civilization had to be – while the game had what was for the time a very advanced in-game encyclopedia and tips system, dedicated interactive tutorials that taught the player to play as they played were not yet a thing. They couldn’t be; games came on a couple of floppy disks and computers and development philosophy were not yet mature enough to implement that sort of advanced feature.

This set the barrier to entry at a fairly high level. Strategy games like Civ were only truly accessible to those willing to put in the time and effort to read a 100-page manual, and who also had no problem with being crushed in their first few games as part of a bracing learning experience. There are people who look back to these days with a kind of wistful longing. It was a time when – since insane Grognards were the target market rather than a fringe group that it is assumed will buy the game anyway – games were more complex, more demanding, and far more unforgiving. You have to work very hard to make a fundamental error in a modern Civilization game; if you don’t start on one of the harder difficulty settings off the bat the game straight up won’t let you. Back then, it was par for the course.

I don’t agree with those people, even if I do feel a slight twinge of unease when I watch Battlefield 3 play itself for ten minutes and when 2K Software trumpet the inclusion of a “1999 mode” in Bioshock Infinite where the player doesn’t instantly respawn on death as being for hardcore players. Experiences with games like Dwarf Fortress have convinced me that a Matterhorn-like learning curve is not necessarily a good thing, and that there is absolutely no reason why a game shouldn’t be as accessible as it possibly can. So I endorse interactive tutorials and in-game help; they’re an important step forward for games development as long as – and this is the important part – as long as I can turn them off. This ties into the way modern games implement difficulty settings, but at the end of the day I want to be able to play a game in the way that I choose. Not the developer. Me. I bought the damn thing, and I’d like it to pander to my idiocy when I’m learning how to play it but also provide a challenging, enjoyable experience that’s not a walkover once I’ve got the basic concepts down. I don’t want to be playing a game that caters to the lowest common denominator all the time, which is where a lot of modern games go horribly, horribly wrong.

But I’m getting off topic here; that’s a separate argument for another day. With the advent of interactive tutorials game manuals have shrunk down to next to nothing. In most boxed games I buy these days the only documentation included – apart from leaflets with the inevitable preorder DLC codes printed on them – is a small sheet of paper telling me how to install the game on my computer. It’s expected that once I’ve booted it the program itself will take care of the nitty-gritty of teaching me how to play it. And this is all fine and good from a pedagogical point of view – desirable, even – but after the disappearance of the old manuals I’m feeling that today’s games are missing something extra that they provided. It’s a wider background; a sense of context both in terms of the game and the game design.

I think the Microprose manuals are the best way of illustrating this because it’s something that they particularly excelled at. Many manuals included oodles of backstory and other assorted fluff, but few of them displayed the clear passion for the game’s subject area that Microprose did. Microprose manuals were littered with neat historical facts that were relevant to the game. Microprose manuals invariably had a couple of pages of notes written by the designers at the end explaining the thinking behind certain features being implemented (or not). Microprose manuals had reading lists just in case the player was sufficiently enthused by the game experience to venture down the same avenues of research the developers did. This more than anything else is what endeared them to me; the manuals for Microprose games were documents that assumed the person who had bought it was both intelligent enough and interested enough to want to know what the developers thought was particularly neat or important about the game they’d spent the last year of their lives working on. They presented video games as a mutual hobby shared by developer and player alike, not as a series of disposable products designed to fatten up the publisher’s bottom line.

The end result of this approach was that I read those manuals cover to cover several times. Most of what I know about pirates I learned from Pirates! Gold and its manual. Most of what I know about the colonisation of the Americas I learned from Colonization and its manual. And while the development of the railways in the 19^th century was one of the modules for my A-Level history course, most of what I remember about that period I learned from Railroad Tycoon and its manual. Civilization taught me about concepts like feudalism and organised labour. Darklands gave me an encyclopaedic knowledge of dark age German society and medieval weaponry. This is an aspect of games that I think has been lost in the quest for a more interactive, more immersive experience; their ability to peripherally educate the player in areas other than gameplay mechanics – never mind that by doing this they could easily make the experience more immersive than all the whizz-bang scripted cutscenes in the world by giving the player’s actions some much-needed context.

And of course it’s not just limited to learning history by osmosis; there’s also the insights into what the game designers were thinking when they implemented feature X that can come with a properly-written manual. To demonstrate why this sort of thing is useful I’ll use the example of the last game I bought with a truly comprehensive manual: Civilization 4. The vast majority of it was a curiously joyless set of instructions on how to play the game — which seemed rather redundant in the face of the elaborate in-game measures intended to aid the player in doing just that – but nestled away in the back were five or six pages of small, neatly formatted writing penned by the lead designer on Civ 4, Soren Johnson, where he briefly summed up how the game had evolved out of the relative failure of Civ 3¹ and set out the case for the changes they’d made. I found this a fascinating insight to the design process and it really gave me a new appreciation for the game — on subsequent forays into Civ 4 and its expansions I was able to look at what they’d done with it and say “Yes, that makes sense,” instead of thinking “What the hell is this doing here?”

Old-style game manuals are never going to be brought back. Not only has the packaging of boxed games changed to the point where they cannot handle a large manual, but much of the content that used to be included – such as the various gameplay tips that used to be sprinkled throughout – are monetised as strategy guides these days, or else used as part of the game’s marketing campaign in the run-up to release. Games are big business now, and you can’t turn back the clock. But since the process of teaching the player how to play the game has made its way into the game itself, I see no reason why the detailed background information that used to be included cannot do so as well. Civilization has been doing this for years with its Civilopedia (although the Civilopedia in 3 and 4 was absolutely dire in the way it was formatted) and the Total War games make probably the most respectable attempt; I’ve happily whiled away several hours flipping through Shogun 2’s interactive encyclopedia of units, buildings and technologies. For a fictional example, the Mass Effect games have a very comprehensive codex that explains the backstory behind the game’s universe, although – again – it’s terribly presented and a chore to sort though. Nevertheless these games prove it can be done, and it’s a very easy way to build up the player’s imagination as to what’s really going on behind the scenes.

This is why I’m somewhat surprised that most games just don’t bother, instead ending up as paper-thin narrative experiences that the player isn’t invested in at all. To take a random example from last year’s games: Relic’s Space Marine makes almost no attempt whatsoever to explain to the player the wider relevance of their actions or what might be at stake. Its sole concession to this is a line in the intro which basically says THIS FORGE WORLD IS PRECIOUS TO US before chucking the player into the thick of  it. Perhaps I could have ignored this if it was the prelude to a well-written, compelling story, but unfortunately Relic forgot to include this. And it might not have mattered too much if the gameplay had been pulse-pounding, frantic excitement, but unfortunately Relic forgot to include this also. A Mass Effect-style codex explaining just what I was doing on that planet in the first place wouldn’t have saved Space Marine from being a bad game, but perhaps it would have saved me from developing a nervous tic in my right eye from all the wincing I was doing as I played through the game’s single-player campaign.

(And then there’s Sword of the Stars, the developers of which wrote a detailed and actually fairly interesting backstory for each of the playable races – explaining their biology, their culture, their history, their approaches to technology – and then, utterly inexplicably, didn’t bother to include any of it in the game. They didn’t even include it in the manual. If you want to read that stuff you have to go to the fan wiki. This is an act of unbelievable stupidity that ensures the empire management parts of the game are a stunningly dry and sterile experience.)

So if one of my nine readers happens to be a game developer² then this is what you should do. First, make a game which implements a direct port of the Necromunda tabletop rules from the late 90s. Second, don’t skimp on the manual. If you don’t want to use it to tell the player how to play the game, then you can at least use it to gain their undying respect by telling them what it’s about, whether in virtual form or no.

 1. I’m sure Josh will take umbrage at this, but until Civ 5 was released the third game was by far the worst received in the series.

2. No, Kenti, you don’t count.

The post In Praise Of: Microprose Manuals. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.