Month: November 2023

Through the machinations of rival supercomputers FATE and the Prometheus Circuit, Serge wound up DNA locked to the security system of high-tech future city Chronopolis. Lynx, an agent of FATE, swapped bodies with him so he could unlock the security system, but the enemies he made along the way are fighting tooth and claw to keep him from returning to Chronopolis, unlocking the security system, and once again giving FATE the power of the legendary artifact called the Frozen Flame. Cat!Serge, stuck in Lynx’s body, was cast into an alternate timeline, which isn’t even the first time this happened to him. After sorting out how to cross between timelines again, he has linked back up with the anti-FATE coalition and helped them rebound from Dark Serge’s attacks.

The six dragon gods of the region seem sympathetic to the anti-FATE coalition, but they’re reluctant to provide direct assistance for unclear reasons. They rescued cat!Serge when FATE collapsed the alternate timeline version of Chronopolis on top of him, but they haven’t been flying around torching Dark Serge’s ships or anything. For that matter, they won’t even pop a new body for cat!Serge out of Fort Dragonia, which cat!Serge needs in order to get access to Chronopolis before Dark Serge can. Cat!Serge already has (an alternate timeline version of) the Dragon Tear used for bodyswapping, all he needs is a body to swap into, and the dragons say they can provide it, but apparently he needs to first obtain their blessing by reaching and defeating each of the six of them in turn. Only then will Fort Dragonia create a new body for him which he can use the Dragon Tear to swap into (best not to think too much about what happens to the discarded cat body).

This is a lie. The Black Dragon created an army of monsters to control Marbule basically just as a fuck you to some imperialist colonizers who tried to invade it. Any one of the dragons can create a new body for Serge no problem. The real truth is that they were on the losing end of a war with Chronopolis 6,000 years ago, fought for control of the Frozen Flame, and that Chronopolis has been unstoppable since winning and getting control of the Frozen Flame. The storm that DNA locked Serge to the Frozen Flame’s security system, locking FATE out of it, was the first chance they’d had to meaningfully fight back against FATE in millennia. So long as Serge’s DNA, whether in Dark Serge or reincarnated Serge, is outside of Chronopolis, Team Dragon is still in the game. If either copy of Serge gets to Chronpolis, unlocks the Frozen Flame, and then does not hand it over to Team Dragon, the dragons are fucked. They need to be absolutely positive Serge has what it takes to crack Chronopolis open before he goes in there. If Serge isn’t going to succeed, they’d rather he die somewhere where one of them can immediately obliterate the corpse, and maintain plausible deniability about whether or not they’re in the anti-FATE coalition in case Dark Serge gets back into Chronopolis.

But they don’t want cat!Serge to know any of this, because it’s very important they maintain their mystique as vaguely benevolent nature gods of El Nido. Pretty much any one of FATE’s minions can theoretically sit down with cat!Serge right now and explain that the dragon gods are the nature deities of a third, radically different timeline where dinosaurs won the ancient war with cavemen (something which happened in this setting, it’s in Chrono Trigger) and an entirely different civilization developed. And their basic plan here is to kill all humans to recreate their old timeline in this one. The dragon gods have been lucky that FATE is so spectacularly bad at diplomacy that no one’s ever said that to cat!Serge and he probably wouldn’t believe them if they did, and if Team Dragon swaps the mystique of “dragon gods work in mysterious ways” for “we’re not confident you can defeat FATE’s robot army,” it might encourage cat!Serge to think of them as less incarnations of benevolence and more as conventional allies who might betray him after their common enemy is defeated. FATE has done most of the damage to a potential anti-dragon coalition all by itself, but the dragons don’t want to bungle it at the last second.

While running around gathering up the blessings of the six dragon gods, cat!Serge also runs into a few final allies.

The objective of the final mission of StarCraft is to reduce the HP of the Zerg Overmind’s outer shell to zero. Once this happens, regardless of how much of the Zerg base or forces you’ve destroyed, you go to a cut scene in which Tassadar sacrifices himself to ram the Overmind and kill it. According to his dialogue, this is necessary because your forces have been severely weakened in the process of cracking the outer shell. Naturally, how much sense this makes depends a lot on how the mission went. If you were running low on resources, you may have indeed pushed a carrier fleet through the perimeter and ignored incoming Zerg reinforcements to reduce the Overmind’s shell to 0 HP while being pretty much tapped out for any base-clearing operations.

On the other hand, if you’re neurotic about leaving survivors, you might have scrupulously killed everything before allowing your units to target the Overmind and end things, making Tassadar’s final dialogue pretty much exactly the opposite of true. I’ve got eighteen carriers, man! Not only is the entire Zerg base cleaned out, but I could go clean out another base of similar size right now without even producing any more units, to say nothing of the fact that I have three active resource-gathering bases.

This is an inevitability of RTS gameplay. Besides unsatisfying cheats like auto-respawning destroyed buildings or units in the core of the Zerg base so that it’s impossible to clear the base before taking down the Overmind (StarCraft II is more prone to doing this kind of thing to guarantee that the map resembles what it’s supposed to be in the story no matter how much effort you put into clearing it, and I hate it), you can’t prevent the player from overkilling the mission to the point where Tassadar’s sacrifice comes across like nonsense. For example, in the eighth Protoss mission of the Brood War expansion, you are supposed to capture and defend a temple long enough for some psychic ritual to kill all Zerg on the planet Shakuras. There are three Zerg AI, one in front of the temple and two behind it. The two behind the temple have considerably larger and more heavily defended bases. It’s certainly possible to wipe out the Zerg completely making the psychic ritual at the end seem kind of ceremonial, but the most straightforward way to complete the mission is to leave the largest, toughest hive clusters alone and focus on securing the temple.

But it’s not just possible to do this sort of thing in the last mission of StarCraft 1’s core campaign, I strongly suspect that it is the average player’s first experience of the mission. Sure, they probably don’t bother clearing the entire Zerg base before hitting the Overmind down to the last building, but they probably do clear out all the active defenses and only avoid destroying ultralisk caverns and defiler mounds because those are tech buildings, not unit producers, and they’re not necessary to the objective, so why bother? They still end up in a position where their army/fleet is completely stomping Jormungand Brood (and Tiamat Brood, if there’s anything left of it).

The only reason you’d end up doing the thing where you rush your attackers in to hit the Overmind without destroying the defending swarm and spore/sunken colonies is if you’re either speedrunning or you don’t have enough resources to plausibly take out the whole Zerg base, so you go straight for the objective and hope for the best. Nobody speedruns a game on their first try back in 1998 when you couldn’t stream a gimmick like “blind speedrun of [game],” and the mission has such a gargantuan amount of resources that you can’t really lose by running out. You either get your base overrun because you weren’t able to harvest and spend those resources quickly and effectively enough, or else you have everything you need to create 24 carriers and 24 battlecruisers and a dozen siege tanks and a dozen arbiters to cloak them all (you have both a Terran and a Protoss base and they have separate supply count, so the maximum size of your army is immense). That would take a long time and there’s not really any point when the Zerg base can be cracked with much less, but the resources for it are there. There’s six empty resource nodes on the map and one of them is a mineral patch big enough to overcome the Overmind’s defenses at least five times over. That one absurdly mega-huge resource patch could probably pay for the last three or four missions combined.

That’s not to say the mission is extremely easy, because you can still get overrun, but I find it pretty unlikely that the average player wasn’t in a position that ranged from slightly to extremely advantageous when Tassadar sacrifices himself on the grounds that their position is super precarious.

Also there’s a weird bug in the AI of both of the last two missions where the enemy just gives up once you’ve penetrated their base. Drones stop harvesting resources, reinforcements stop getting brought in. It’s like the Overmind saw my carrier fleet rip through the spore colony perimeter and said “well, can’t do anything to stop that, guess I’ll just die.” The StarCraft 1 AI isn’t smart enough to produce counters to enemy units it spots, so it’s kind of right – trickling in hydralisks and mutalisks stands no chance of defeating the fleet, what he really needs to do is amass lots of scourges and defilers (the Brood War AI does this) even then it’s questionable whether he can trade effectively with my infinity minerals. But it’s still weird to see the AI go afk.

Zeus: Master of Olympus is a city builder set in Greek mythology (and occasionally actual ancient Greek history). It has an expansion, Poseidon: Master of Atlantis, which introduces something strange but effective for a city-builder game: A second playable faction. Atlantean citizens have slightly different needs from Greeks, although in most cases it’s just a palette-swap. This also moves the action from Greek mythology to a blend of Greek mythology and Atlantean conspiracy theories. Atlantis is a pyramid-building civilization on a giant island in the Atlantic Ocean, and sail westward to the Mayans and eastward to the Egyptians, where their pyramid-building ways would influence both of these two civilizations to build pyramids of their own (because a lost trans-Atlantic civilization is required to explain how two completely different civilizations could’ve independently decided to tidy up the corners on a pile of stuff). Then twenty years later they released Hades, an isometric roguelike action game, which was a weird direction to take the series.

Poseidon is an expansion pack to an existing game, so its scope is pretty limited. It swaps out olive oil for orange juice, swaps out Greek culture buildings like theaters and philosopher podiums for Atlantean super-science buildings like observatories and laboratories, and it replaces the Greek stadium for the Olympic games with a hippodrome for chariot racing. The main draws of the expansion are filling in some holes in Greek mythology (in the original game’s twelve deities, for example, Olympian Hera is swapped out for Chthonic Hades – the expansion adds in Hera and Atlas, the latter mainly because a god of carrying things real good is actually very relevant to the game’s mechanics) and six new playable “adventures,” the game’s story campaign. The original game only had seven adventures, so six is a lot, and those are the main draw of Poseidon: There’s more Zeus. It’s an expansion pack, that’s what they were selling.

But the concept got me thinking about using Atlantis as the frame for a city builder game that spanned multiple different ancient civilizations. Sort of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate but for the Impressions city-builder series instead of Nintendo. The city-builder series also included Pharaoh, Caesar, and Emperor (the latter was for ancient and medieval China, which is casting a Hell of a wide net). Those three focused on history over mythology and I think they were weaker for it, so partly I’m just daydreaming about versions of those games that had mythology-based scenarios instead of sticking to a linear historical narrative and which are also accessible from the same menu. China and to a lesser extent Rome would be a bit out of place with the Atlantean frame story, but, you could have Mayan, Celtic, Norse, and Persian factions and it wouldn’t be any more anachronistic than the Athens adventure from Zeus setting the Persian Wars in the 9th century BC. You could rope in the Chinese (and the Indians, while we’re at it) if you went full Conan with it, having a world made of fictional expies for various civilizations that weren’t coterminous, because hey, who’s to say where the Po Dynasty and the Telleroi city-states are in relation to each other, I just made those up, I can put them wherever I want.

Mechanically, all these factions won’t be hard to design. Everyone’s food supply and resource extraction is going to be nearly identical, it’s only cultural buildings and exactly what goods people demand that will change the fundamental citybuilding. You also want some very different endgame projects with very different mechanics for each faction to help really set them apart from one another, even if it’s not super important for simulationist reasons if a Temple of Artemis and a Sphinx are basically the same. Making them have significantly different effects when built will make playing Greeks and Egyptians feel different, though.

There’s also some more fundamental resource differences, for example, Egyptians have more different types of farms and other things that are built on riverlands like clay pits, tying them very directly to the Nile, which means their cities tend to be packed around a narrow but continuous strip of useful land, while Greek maps have mountain meadows, ore deposits, and shorelines for piers to ship goods in and out all in different locations, and thus tend to focus more on connecting all these different resource nodes together – you need to ship food to your mines and trade piers to feed the workers living there, and ship bronze and silver from your mines to the trade piers to trade for whatever goods you can’t produce locally, and then ship those goods out to the meadows and mines to supply the workers, and then find some way to defend it all from enemy raiding parties.

Whereas an Egyptian city is surrounded by empty space that’s hard to find use for, which means both that you shove all your military buildings out there because they have way fewer continuous needs (you need to ship weapons and armor out there, but those aren’t consumed at a steady rate, so it’s fine if it takes a while), and that empty space also provides a defense: you have plenty of time to muster an army and meet an enemy in the field when they spawn at the edge of the map, Greek maps are full of sprawl and are more likely to build near the edges, so you need actual walls to slow an enemy down while your troops muster, especially since the least valuable space where you cram your military buildings in might be in the geographic heart of your city, a midpoint between the mountains, meadows, and piers.

But since that’s almost entirely in map design, we don’t need to build fundamental mechanics into the Greek and Egyptian factions to reflect that. We don’t need to ban Greeks from using clay pits and making pottery, just design maps where the clay deposits are usually made wet by seawater, so it’s not arable anyway, so of course you put your clay pits there, the land isn’t useful for anything else. If you put a Greek city on a Nile map, they would play much more similarly to the Egyptians, just with different endgame monuments and also it would be one of those maps where you have to import all your olive oil, but that happens even in Greece.

But while the mechanics for a game like this are quite manageable, the number of art assets would potentially be a much greater challenge. The Greek agora and the Egyptian market have basically the same mechanics, but you would still expect them to look different. The mechanics of Greek theaters and philosophy podiums might be basically identical to Egyptian jugglers and musicians, but that means it’s entirely on the appearance and sound of the buildings and walkers to distinguish the culture of the two. A lot of buildings are mechanically fully identical to one another, like a wheat farm or a maintenance post (used to prevent buildings from collapsing or catching fire), but the building still needs to look like it was built by Egyptians/Greeks and the people working it to show that it’s operational (as opposed to lacking resoruces, workers, etc. etc.) need to be dressed like Egyptians/Greeks.

Part of the reason why I wish I could go back in time and tell Impressions to make this game in 2002 is because they had a bunch of assets right in front of them: Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor, and Caesar III all look pretty similar to each other, and it’s not jarring to go from one to another. A couple of assets might need a redesign to look good next to others, but even that shouldn’t be too common, because you don’t build two different cities of two different factions on the same map, so the only units from a civilization that will be seen in context of another are military units.

Foretales is a card game set in one of those anthropomorphic animal fantasy settings that indie games seem to like. It’s not small-child-scary-world industry-dominating phenomenon, but it crops up semi-regularly.

Foretales is a card game, you have a party of hopefully three characters, and you draw a hand of six cards in even proportion, so with three characters, that’s two cards from each deck. Once a deck runs out, your hand size goes down with it. If one of your three characters is out of cards, you only have four cards in your hand. Cards do different things when played on different location cards, so if you play the thief protagonist’s Nimble Hands card on a market place, he’ll steal some gold, but play it on a tavern and he’ll steal some food. If you run out of cards, you can no longer really interact with the game at all, so you’ve got to rest, which gets you back three cards for every party member but usually comes with some consequence, like increasing the number of enemies on scattered around different locations or, if you take too many rests, just slapping you with an immediate game over.

When you end up in a fight, you can use assorted resources to convince enemies not to bother fighting you. Fame, which you generally get for being nice, works especially well on guards, while grim, which you generally get for being mean, works especially well on bandits, but you can use either if you have enough of it. Gold works well on both of them, but not so well on cultists, who only respond to grim. Failing that, you can actually kill the bastards, and every foe killed gives you grim. If you reduce enemy morale low enough, whether by bribing or intimidating them or whatever or by violence, surviving enemies run away and you get fame for each one who runs.

That’s a bunch of weird mechanics attached to nifty little decks that help differentiate a cast of characters from one another. Is it fun? Eh. Fun enough that I didn’t mind playing through to the end of the game once to get a bad ending which then sent me back to the beginning for a new game+, but not fun enough that I felt the need to try and get a good ending. The game is all about getting dire visions of the future, and the new game+ starts right after you get the artifact that inflicts the visions, so the idea is that your failed runs are visions of doom from the artifact. I like it when games incorporate failure into the narrative instead of asking you to reload over and over again, slowly crafting a single canon run where the hero never fails out of a dozen or more non-canon failures, but Foretales doesn’t even do that entirely, since any time you get just plain old run out of HP or cards+rests you still just reload.

But more importantly, this setup demands you replay mostly the same game several times, and it’s not nearly enough fun for me to bother with that. Sure, I learned a lot about how to play during my first playthrough and could play much better my second time through, especially in the early quests where they’re quite easy, and there’s different routes through the game so (rough guess) only maybe a third of the quests would be repeats. Like, the cut scene of the bad ending I got ended with a pretty heavy-handed hint that I should immediately start hunting down the doom cult you confront in the final act of the game, ignoring all other concerns, whereas in my initial playthrough those other concerns had seemed sufficiently pressing (friend on death row, guards about to massacre a striking miners’ union) that I never got around to confronting an annoying aristocrat who later on turned out to be a cult leader. So, okay, ignore the other disasters and sprint straight for her.

But I know from the way the quest select screen is laid out that I’m definitely going to be replaying some of these quests because there just aren’t enough empty slots for my second playthrough to be wholly unique, and even if it were, the mechanics were already starting to lose my interest at the end of my first playthrough. It couldn’t be more clear that this game is meant to be played multiple times so this isn’t really complete, but that just means I’m putting it into regrets. I just don’t want to play anymore.

Back in the 90s and 00s, Impressions Games made historical citybuilder games. I mainly played two, that being the Egyptian themed Pharaoh and the Greek themed Zeus: Master of Olympus. Zeus is much better. Why, though? The only major difference between the two is their art assets. Other differences are numerous and non-trivial, but converting Pharaoh to Zeus’ mechanics would’ve been more the realm of an expansion pack that a sequel. And yet, these relatively minor mechanical differences add up to Zeus being a much better game, which makes me sad because sometimes I wanna build a cool desert city. So what are the differences that made Zeus better?

Just Cause games always have a map that’s about 30-35 kilometers to a side. I think they picked this size because it’s big enough that you can fly a jet across it without breaking the illusion that you are flying across an actual country and not an area smaller than most respectably sized metropolitan areas (that illusion still requires fighter jets to fly about as fast as a Cessna, but that’s still much faster than a helicopter so it still feels like jets are fast and that’s enough to maintain the illusion). Maybe they did it semi-randomly in Just Cause 1, just kind of mindlessly pushing the limits of how big a playspace then-current hardware would allow, and now they don’t want to have a smaller game world in any of the sequels. However they arrived at that number, fact is that they never properly use all that space. Even Just Cause 3, which is easily the best of the series (so far, but word is that Just Cause 4 fell off), struggles to use about half of the map. There’s two archipelagos down south where the first two-thirds of the game take place that have a decent number of towns and villages in them, and then there’s the mainland to the north which has a few more cities on the southern coast and then actual miles of nearly empty land dotted only with military bases and outposts.

They definitely shouldn’t have stamped down any more of the same, because the game’s already getting a bit repetitive as it is, and the new military bases are often prison camps full of mines of the made up resource Bavarium, which is plot-relevant and has some unique doodads to blow up compared to previous areas. They do pack all the Bavarium mines right next to each other which is a bit of a problem, since if I just burn west to east across the map blowing up military bases as I go, I’ll end up doing like four Bavarium mines in a row. There’s a decent bit of gameplay variety between liberating a military base versus liberating a city, so intermixing them is good, which they did on the southern archipelagos but do less of on the northern mainland.

But the real problem with the game’s third act and its corresponding mainland is that there’s something like 3 kilometers between the two nearest points of interest. While there is something to be said for driving through a quiet countryside between assaults, this isn’t a small handful of remote outposts nor is this some kind of STALKER-style immersive experience. It’s half-ish (maybe even two-thirds) of the map with only one-third of the gameplay in it, and the distance made up with a commute. It’s not long enough to get really aggravating, it’s the kind of game where I’m listening to a podcast or talking to a friend or something anyway, but even a minor nuisance sticks out when it could’ve been got rid of by making less. Just take all your military bases and remove two of the three kilometers of empty land between any two of them and now your last act landmass is about the same size as the first and second and has about the same amount of content. And then maybe swap some military outposts out for some villages so they don’t get so repetitive.

Still a great game overall, though. Kind of nervous about Just Cause 4 ruining it somehow. Just Cause 3 nailed the basic formula, all you need to add at this point is new locales to liberate the shit out of. Sure, generating all those assets is expensive, but it’s not like there’s a design puzzle to solve here. Do Just Cause 3 but in Alaska or something, and ideally on a smaller map.

Also, this isn’t related, but I don’t want to make an entire extra post for this one paragraph: This game crashes like once every two hours. Luckily it’s got really good checkpoints and autosaves. It’s very annoying and flowbreaking to be halfway through blowing up an outpost only to crash, reload, and find I’m now half a kilometer away and all the enemy patrols are reset, but all the target objects I need to blow up to clear the outpost remain destroyed, so I don’t lose any progress, just get yanked outside to assault again. Depending on the outpost type, this sometimes makes things easier (some outposts summon continuous reinforcements while others have a fixed but very large pool of troops, and both get reset every time you close the game and reload, so a crash might clear a bunch of reinforcements as often as it will revive a bunch of guards). This might be related to my min-maxed processor and graphics card where my graphics card is awful but my processor is a monster, but Just Cause 3 is a 2015 game which the beastly processor can usually chew through even with minimal assistance from a graphics card, and word on the internet is that JC3 is generally a pretty unstable game. Good job on the autosaving, though, I never would’ve expected a game with crashes this frequent to be a mild nuisance rather than dealbreakingly frustrating, but they pulled it off.