CasualHardcore

A long time between posts, in the best of Blog tradition. Lots of stuff on, and I haven’t been working on my games recently. going to endevaour to be more diligent in this regard soon. Stay tuned.

I am moving my technical posts on things like Ruby on Rails and software development to a new blog - Top Secret Project: Toby Hede’s Blog on Ruby, Rails, User Experience and Stuff.

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I’ve always been astounded by the pointlessness of Twitter. The real secret of Twitter is that it melds (mashes-up, if you will allow me some Web 2.0 jargon) utter pointlessness and total addiction in equal measure. Thinking about it last week I suddenly realised that what I really needed was a way to update Twitter automatically … and so AutoTwit was born.

I’ve been coming to grips with Ruby on Rails for a while now … my day-job alternates between Java and PHP, so Rails is something that I only get to do in my spare time or on private projects (like Eastern Front).  AutoTwit was the perfect scenario for testing the new release of Rails in the wild.

• Rails is Rapid: the entire project took about 6 hours of continous dev time, not counting stoppages.
• Configuring Rails and Ruby on the MacBook took a little bit of effort. The default install isn’t configured correctly and I had to go back and start again using the Hivelogic tutorial. Straightforward, but diagnosing the problem was the hard part. I am still getting to know my way around OS X.
• There’s a Gem or Plugin for everything - I found a Rails Twitter Plugin which made the job a bit easier. Not that the Twitter API is complex in anyway. I was confounded for some time by various issues on the Mac (see previous step).
• As often seems the case in my work at the moment, the most time consuming part of the process was the interface. Rails handles database and controller logic with aplomb, but navigating JavaScript, CSS and browser compatibilities is a different story. CSS is a time-sink, in particular … I think this is the nature of the beast more than anything else, design requires pushing pixels around till everything is just-so. I must admit I gave up before everything was perfect … there are some minor alignment issues in Safari, for example.
• I love Rails. As I said to a friend who has been brainwashed by my raving about how wonderful Rails is: the only problem with learning Rails is that you’ll hate your day job. Enough said.

Next up is some more work on Eastern Front. And a rather hare-brained vision I am currently pondering …

I have been busy honing my Ruby On Rails skills.

AutoTwit is this week’s result.

Too busy for Twitter? AutoTwit is a tool to automatically updates your Twitter account. Write a post, schedule an update. Its Automatically Pointless! And all made on a Sunday afternoon with Ruby on Rails, Prototype, Scriptaculous, a MacBook Pro and a whole lot of caffeine.

Stay tuned: I am going to be writing up my experiences about How I learned to stop worrying and love Ruby on Rails.

read more | digg story

The latest articles in the TeaLeaves Space 4X series are up:

• Spaceward Ho!
• Masters of Orion

Both are excellent, thoughtful articles on game design.

Tea Leaves has started what looks like an interesting series on Space 4X games (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate): Pigs In Space.

The politics of 4X games are always problematic … the assumptions are colonial, imperial.  Although distinctions are often made for different types of governments, mostly this ends up as being a serious of modifiers (Capitalist receives Industry +1) rather than being a real determinate factor in the gameplay.

One of the other issues has always been complexity … I have great problems getting involved with games that require the ability to compute 10,000 variables in your head in order to work out the outcome of an action. Galactic Civilizations 2 was one of my picks for last year largely because it managed to make so much of the underlying complexity intuitive.

I’ve been playing Defcon a fair bit. OK, so much that I see missiles flying when I close my eyes. I’ve met with some success online, but I think the influx of demo players skews the results somewhat in my favour.

Game balance is very delicately poised in Defcon. All players start with the same forces. The only varying influence is the player’s deployment and the geography of the chosen Super Power. Europe, for example, is very tightly confined, which makes defence much easier, but also means Russian Radar has very good information of the location of your defences. North America has access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which means your naval forces must generally be split between the two.
As the balance is so delicate, most of the game seems to revolve around finding a single point of weakness and focusing on that. Generally, the first major contact with the enemy will be a naval encounter - winning this initial encounter is crucial … removing the enemy navy allows you to plant your submarines and carries near your opponents coast, while simultaneously removing the threat of their navy. Subs provide a potentionally devestating nuclear capability, while your carriers provide a flexible launch platform for bombing strikes. The offensive difference in capability provided by naval superiority is often enough to ensure victory, even if only a particularly pyhric one.
The underlying structure of Defcon reminds me somewhat of Chess … the initial opening moves can detemine the ultimate winner of the game. Deploy your pieces, set up your position and watch the missiles fly.

The headline may be polemic, but Defcon is seriously good. You need to go download the demo now. When I get over my excitement, I will have something more informative to say.

The game takes warfare to a new place - it’s abstract, calculating.

Missiles fly and millions die.

Think chess. With nukes.

I’ve been reading The Fall of Berlin by Antony Beevor, who also wrote the phenomenal Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943. Both books deal with the incredible brutality of Weorld War II conflict in some detail.

Beevor documents pretty carefully the barbarity of the Red Army as it advances across Greater Germany - the rape and slaughter of untold numbers of civilians. A lot of the Red Army attititude to German civilians is explained by the fact that the Germans did pretty much the same things (if not worse) on the way East in ‘41. Coupled to all of this is the incredilbe hubris and callousness of the Nazis themselves, and the insanity of Hitler and his sycophantic posse by the late stages of the war. The Nazis are hopelessly disorganised and “their” people are largely left to fend for themselves.

How does this relate to games?

It got me thinking, amid the spate of World War II flavoured games, the war is treated in rather glamorous terms. The very harsh realities of what large-scale conflict really means, the futile deaths outside the broad and daring clashes of military might on the battlefield are lost.
So I was thinking, how could a game designer engage with this stuff?

Imagine having to make the decide whether to use the rail system to evacuate civilians or supply troops. Or having to deal with the civilian toll of your advance. Or even if it was just displayed on the screen. Or having to manage refugees. Or losing control of your troops and them engage in indisciminate rapine and slaughter.

It would be controversial, if nothing else.

[Image is from Wikipedia].

I’ve been playing Battle for Middle-Earth II, and I have mixed feelings about it at this satge. I am perhaps 5 missions into the Good Campaign - the single-player missions as the forces of good (in this case Elves, and on occasion, Dwarves).

I haven’t played the original, so I can’t comment as to any advances that have been made  from the first version.

Impressions:

• Resource Management
  Resource management is nicely handled by single structures that provide income. Elves need Mallorn trees and Dwarves need mines. This fits into the world really nicely and removes the need to harvest. Personally not a fan of that style of play. Very similar to Warhammer: Dawn of War, although in Dawn of War, the resource structures can only be built on strategic points on the map, making territory much more strategic. BfME does not seem to have a similar focus.
• Heroes
  I am in two minds about Heroes. So far I have played with Glorfindel, Gloin, Haldir, Arwen and Elrond, as well as some Eagles. Heroes are really powerful. Much more powerful than standard units … so much so that a single hero can easily take on battalions of regular units. This is obviously in keeping with the world (and the movies). However, having to manage the heroes is a real pain … having single extra units to manipulate just adds to the management difficulty. Dawn of War has similar powerful units but you can attach them to regualr units. I may well be missing some interface nicety here.
• Formations
  Groups of units can be arranged into formation, simialr to the Tactical Map in Rome: Total War. Handled in a similar way, drag the mouse to adjust the width and depth of the line. It’s smart enough to place the units in some form of order - archers at the rear, swordsmen at the front. But, so far, it doesn’t really seem to matter.
• Combat
  Battles descend into click-fests really quickly, and I haven’t real seen any evidence that says this is not the normal state of play. Battle is fought in time-honoured RTS tradition. More resources, bigger army, victory. Not much scope for cunning.

Overall, it’s defnitely fun, but the combat model is pretty standard fare.

How much strategy is in your average RTS?

This interesting History of Real Time Strategy makes the observation:

… rarely does a game actually reward players for actually employing a particularly complex strategy with few units of low power against a far larger force which, by most calculations, should emerge the victor …

Troy at Flash of Steel comments that as many RTS games are really skewed toward production, making strategic prowess difficult to both execute as well as measure and reward.

I wonder if the “Real-Time” is not actually the problem?

The difficulties of simultaneously commanding a vast number of units may mean that brute force and numbers will always beat finesse. As has been much discussed recently, most RTS games ultimately seem to descend into rampant click-fests. In a game driven by frenetic pace, being able to pump more and more units into the fray becomes the dominant strategy. (I’ve always called this the Stalin Strategy or Russian Orthodox because Stalin was prone to much the same idea - with massive resources, massive casualties don’t matter).
Total War would seem to belie this theory, but I think that although battles in Total War are in real-time, combat seems much more conducive to strategic play.

Any given battle is conducted with limited units on the field, with no hope of being able to mass-produce more. This means that much more attention must be payed to losses.

Forces in Total War are placed on the field during a deployment phase (this may vary according to the particular scenario), meaning that careful consideration must be given to the initial deployment of forces, including the surrounding terrain. A mismatch at this stage can actually be fatal.

Finally, and I think most importantly, the combat system in Total War is geared to allow victory without destroying the entirety of the enemy force. Many RTS games allow units to stand their ground until destroyed utterly. In Total War, breaking the enemy line is of crucial importance - a break in the line can often be enough to turn the battle. This places the General in a position of prominence (the General can rally his troops as well as contribute to their breaking), as well as making sustained pressure, rather than brute force the dominant strategy for victory. In Total War it is vitally important to deliver a decisive blow (or withstand one) rather than engaging in a blow-for-blow battle of attrition.

I’ve long had the idea that a game where the units ran independently would be an excellent way of managing strategy games. Build and perhaps train a force, then before battle give them the general gist of your commands and then let them loose. The role of the player would not be to click frenetically around the screen, but to consider and guide the force to victory.