Defcon ships

A couple of months back I wrote a small review for Defcon, which I had
been playing under CrossOver.

Well, it's finally come to the Mac. Ambrosia has released the Mac version
of Defcon here: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/defcon/

With the Mac release I've finally been able to get in some multiplayer
games. (Multiplayer never worked for me in Crossover.) In most games other
humans are far more interesting and difficult opponents than the AI and
Defcon is no exception.

To recap: Defcon is Global Thermonuclear War. You control missile silos,
nuclear submarines, SRBM-armed bombers, and other armaments in a quest to
"lose the least". Cool vector graphics and muted sounds make it feel like
you're conducting the war from a deep bunker, where you'll more likely
than not have to spend the rest of your life waiting for the Earth to
become inhabitable again.

Large multiplayer games get interesting, with the interactions between the
players becoming as important as the mechanics of the weaponry. The score
modes modify these interactions enormously. The default scoring mode gives
you two points for each enemy killed and subtracts one point for each of
your own population killed. (These are actually millions killed, since
this *is* nuclear war after all.) Genocide scoring only gives points for
killing, and Survivor only subtracts points for deaths. In default and
Genocide, it's important to strike carefully and hard to maximize the
points gained from your limited store of nukes. In Survivor, you want to
avoid attracting too much attention, and make sure that the person with
the most survivors doesn't keep his position forever.

Making things even more complicated are alliances. These can be set up at
the beginning to last for the whole game, but normally they're made on the
fly and broken on the fly. This fluidly shifting landscape means you can't
trust your allies, and a misread missile trajectory or bomber course can
easily escalate into all-out war. One game mode, Diplomacy, is entirely
based around this idea. At the beginning of the game all players are made
allies. As the game progresses, the alliance falls apart as the game
escalates. Scoring is Survivor, so victory depends on judging alliances
correctly and never drawing too much attention to yourself.

There's a demo available, which allows playing two-player games against an
AI, hosting two-player human games, and join full multiplayer games
(although only one demo player is allowed in games with more than two
players, and I believe you can only join games with certain settings). If
you like it, you can buy the full version for $25.

If it sounds like your thing, grab the demo and check it out. Send a few
nukes my way if you see me online.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software