So, what'd you get?

Come on, somebody out there got a strategy game for the holidays.

I didn't, but I think I've figured out how to survive as France
in the 19th Century. Oddly enough, it involves foregoing stunts intended
to easily draw prestige and instead emphasizes building railroads and
factories. There's probably a lesson in there.

--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Joseph Nebus <nebusj-.TakeThisOut@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
> Come on, somebody out there got a strategy game for the holidays.
>
> I didn't, but I think I've figured out how to survive as France
> in the 19th Century. Oddly enough, it involves foregoing stunts intended
> to easily draw prestige and instead emphasizes building railroads and
> factories. There's probably a lesson in there.

I didn't, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to hijack this thread and
talk about a strategy game I've been playing for a bit.

The game is Defcon (http://www.everybody-dies.com/), which currently has
no Mac version but one is in the works and can be expected Soon(tm). I've
been playing it in CrossOver on my Intel Mac.

As the name implies, it's basically Global Thermonuclear War. You get
missile silos, aircraft carriers, long-range nuclear bombers, ballistic
missile submarines, and other tools of civilization-ending war. The goal
is to "lose the least", as you get points for killing the enemy's
population and lose double points for having them kill yours.

The developers (Introversion, also the people behind Darwinia and Uplink)
definitely went with substance over style. The game looks good, but the
graphics are basic line graphics. They work well and tell the story and I
personally think they're very nice, but there definitely wasn't a team of
fifty artists cranking out material for the game. But whatever it might
lack in graphics it more than makes up for in gameplay, and that's what
really counts, right?

Defcon is an RTS with gameplay is somewhat reminiscent of Myth, where you
set up your units early in the game and then that's all you have for the
entire game. There is one exception to this, fighter jets very slowly
regenerate at your airbases, but otherwise there is absolutely no way to
replace your losses.

Although it's an RTS, the game doesn't require any twitch at all. Game
speed is variable, and the slowest is "realtime". Although airplanes and
especially ships have been sped up to balance the gameplay, realtime
really does mean realtime: your ICBMs will take maybe half an hour to
reach an enemy on the other side of the planet, and everything moves
slowly enough that even the slowest of us will have plenty of time to do
what's needed on realtime. If you've set everything up and you don't want
to have to wait 20 minutes for your missiles to hit Russia, you can
increase the game speed up to 20x realtime.

One of the interesting gameplay elements is that a lot of units have
multiple capabilities and it takes a significant amount of time to switch
modes. For example, missile silos have an anti-air mode (which also shoots
down incoming ICBMs) and a launch mode. Switching from one to the other
takes several minutes. If you switch all of your silos to launch mode so
you can attack someone, then see a bunch of incoming missiles at the far
edge of your radar, you will not be able to switch back in time to shoot
them down. Another example, bombers have both a naval combat mode and a
nuclear missile mode. If you switch to nuke mode and then happen across
some ships, you have to decide whether to use a valuable nuke on the
ships, ignore them, or keep the bomber safe for the 120 seconds it takes
to switch back to naval combat mode. This isn't always the most realistic
(some people really dislike the fact that air defense and ICBM launching
are mutually exclusive), but I think it really forces you to plan ahead,
and makes the game much more interesting as a result.

Because of the air defenses on missile silos, a lot of the basic gameplay
comes down to waiting for the right moment to attack, or coordinating
massed attacks. If you attack while the enemy is in launch mode, you'll
have a much better chance. Massed attacks can overwhelm enemy air defenses
but are tricky to carry out. In all, there are enough options to make
choosing the right strategy difficult and fun.

I haven't played multiplayer as I haven't been able to make it work in
CrossOver, but it sounds very well done. It supports up to six players and
offers a variety of gameplay options. Most games are played without fixed
alliances, but alliances can be made (and broken) in the game, so there is
a lot of politicking and subterfuge going on. One mode starts everyone out
in one big alliance, and the goal then becomes to fracture that alliance
in a favorable way so that you come out on top.

The single-player mode is just multiplayer with an AI. After several weeks
of playing 1-on-1 against the AI (the demo doesn't let you have more),
I've found it to be too predictable and relatively easy to beat once I
learned its basic strategy. (My latest games have had me losing under 10
million people where the computer loses over 95 million, out of 100
million total.) Replayability probably goes up with more opponents, and
I'm sure that bringing the human factor into the mix will make it much
better.

For those of us who can devote a bit of time to a game regularly but not
always a solid block, Defcon offers an "office mode". In office mode, the
game always runs in realtime and can't be made to go faster. The idea is
that you leave the game running in the background, bringing it forward
every so often to see how you're doing and make changes. A game played
this way would last several hours but not require a lot of attention. I
don't know how popular this mode is, but it sounds like it could be a fun
way to get in some genocide during the work day.

The Mac port will be coming out from Ambrosia, although I don't know when,
it will hopefully not be too much longer. Unless there's something badly
wrong with it I'll be buying it, and I encourage everyone else to check it
out too. The demo allows you to play complete 1-on-1 games against the AI
and it can even join networking games if you aren't running it in
CrossOver and having it break like I am.

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software