CasualHardcore

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]