Knights of the Cardboard Castle

So I finally got around to playing Shogun 2. Just downloading it from Steam turned out to be harder than I expected due to the size of the game and all the associated DLC. That plus I’m still don’t have a reliable wired connection. It’s totally worth it though. I realized that as much as I like the Total War series, I rarely play a campaign to completion. I usually lose interest part way through either when the situation becomes too big and complicated or when things become too much of a straightforward grind. With that in mind, I opted to play a short campaign as the Chosokabe Clan, obviously the easiest of the clans available. It was more challenging than I expected, but it was fun and interesting enough that I had no trouble playing right up until I became Shogun.

Some thoughts:

• Shogun 2 has garnered a reputation as having the best AI, whether on the tactical or the strategic map, of any game in the Total War series. I think after Empire and Napoleon came under heavy criticism for their poor AI, Creative Assembly made especially sure that Shogun 2 would be a challenging game. Judging from the prevailing sentiment, this seems to have been largely a success. In my game, the AI never bothers to attack unless it has a competitive army. Similarly, their naval raiders are smart enough to hit my undefended trading ships and run away when my main fleet shows up.

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Hoard is a lightweight arcade game that I bought only because it was so highly praised by Tom Chick. I thought it would be a little like the old monster games where you control a giant monster and stomp around a city or something. Instead, it’s lighter weight even than that because the maps are so small and so simple, plus the only attack your dragon is breathing fire. So much for my dreams of chomping armored knights in half or knocking down towers with my tail. Some quick notes:

• It’s a very old-school design in which everything is about maximizing your score. In the standard Treasure mode, you get points for stealing gold and bringing it back to your hoard. Each game lasts for a predetermined length of time and whichever dragon has the most points wins. Basically anything on the map can be destroyed for money, towns, carts bringing produce from farms, towers, even little enemy archers.
• Every time your score count hits a certain level, you get to upgrade your dragon so he’s even meaner. You have the usual options like speed, firebreath, armor plus your gold carrying capacity, very helpful to minimize trips between the killing zone and your hoard.  In Treasure mode, your dragon can’t die. If he takes enough damage, he’ll automatically fly back to his hoard to heal, wasting time. But the real punishment is that this resets the multiplier counter, which as you can guess, multiplies all the gold you’ve earned. It can go up to x 3 so it’s obvious that keeping that multiplier at max is key to getting high scores.
• The cool part of this game is that the map is dynamic, to a certain extent. At first, the map will be mostly empty so you’ll be flying around looking for something, anything to smash. But soon enough farms and towns will pop up. If you leave them alone, they’ll grow faster, so you’ll see farms become bigger, towns grow into cities with outbuildings etc. Cities are naturally a richer target and generate more valuable caravan trains for you to hit, but they also spawn more archers to protect them. The same balance goes for pretty much anything. A newly spawned single mage tower can be killed fairly easily, but if you let it upgrade to its full potential, it has insane range and damage. So your dragon will eventually feel like the hunted instead of the hunter.
• The other single-player modes are Princess Rush, in which the winner is the first dragon to successfully kidnap and ransom 15 princesses and Hoard mode, in which your dragon has no homebase and must instead survive for as long as possible on the map. In Hoard mode, the only way to heal is by kidnapping princesses and gathering gold gives you a bonus to your final time.

Overall, this is too lightweight for my usual tastes but it is a decent game to play in short spurts since a session takes no more than 10 minutes or so. It’s also very gratifying to see your skills improve as you practice more. At first, you’ll be stumbling around the countryside repeatedly getting killed by knights and toasted by enemy dragons, but soon enough you’ll be able to dodge bolts from wizard towers and grab princesses from under the noses of other dragons like a pro. You probably will need a gamepad to play it properly however.

As a fun programming exercise and just to see if I could, I decided to try making a PC version of an established boardgame. I picked Caylus: Magna Carta because 1) I own a copy of it (actually a gift from Han a couple of years ago now 2) its main components are cards that I can easily scan and yet the cards are played onto a virtual board, so it’s more like a boardgame than a cardgame and 3) I thought that it should not be too difficult to write an AI for it, as opposed to something like Glory to Rome which has way more combinatorial possibilities.

I’m aware that the standard practice in such cases is to adopt a different name and to avoid using the original art. But I’m doing this just as a learning exercise so I don’t plan to distribute it. Besides, seeing the actual game in action is a key part of my personal motivation for doing this and I can always switch out the art for placeholders later. Anyway, the project is far from done but after nearly a month of work, it’s certainly playable now, so here are some screenshots..

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Jeff Vogel has been making indie RPGs since the mid-1990s but they always looked so cheaply produced that I never paid much attention to them. But when he brought his latest game to Steam and gave it decent graphics to boot, I thought that it was the right time to check out his work. After putting in more than 60 hours into the game, I’m happy to say that not only is it absolutely worth your money and time, but it’s one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played.

The Good Stuff

• It’s a tile-based fantasy RPG with 2D graphics made by mostly one person, so you need to come in with lowered expectations. The combat is turn-based and quite crunchy but the game’s main strength is its setting and writing. Text is used liberally, not only in dialogue but also in descriptions of scenes and places to supplement the graphics. This will turn off impatient players who hate reading but I’ve been a big fan of this approach since Darklands so this is a huge plus for me.

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Well, after finishing with Six Gun Saga, I felt like playing more Western-themed games, and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is it. I believe that this is the first time I’ve played a Western-themed shooter and since Rockstar doesn’t appear to have any plans for porting Red Dead Redemption to the PC, it’s probably the best one we’re going to have for a while. Some thoughts:

• The name is very obviously an allusion to the Call of Duty series and that’s where it takes all its cues from too. It’s mostly a corridor shooter that tries very hard to be cinematic and epic. There are a couple of open-world sequences where you have some choice on what to do and where to go next, but it’s very perfunctory. That apart, it’s all very formulaic, down to vehicle chase sequences, scenes where you need to man a fixed emplacement machine gun etc. There’s even one scene in which you’re on a stagecoach, which behaves for all intents and purposes as if it were a tank.
• I played through the entire first level without first going into the configuration screen and thought the graphics were terrible. The textures were all low-res and so muddy that I couldn’t even see the snipers shooting at me. Then I realized that this was a console port and I probably need to tweak it for my relatively high-end PC. ‘Lo and behold, it’s a pretty game after all, with impressive scenery and good animations. The open-world levels may be empty but they sure look good!

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Since we only played the England side of the board, I guess maybe this should still be called Last Train to Wensleydale. Fun fact: I was confused while looking up this game. After all, why is it Last Train to Wensleydale but First Train to Nuremberg. It turns out that there is a song called Last Train to Nuremberg. Weird. Anyway, this is yet another of Martin Wallace’s train games in which you run a railway company and ship goods and passengers to make money. Some thoughts:

• On the surface, the rules sound like they’re terribly complicated. Each player has a set of black investment cubes, but there are also four tracks, white, brown, red and green respectively, denoting different types of influence. This influence can not be spent to do various things, they also determine turn order for the different phases of the game. But once play actually started, it’s not that hard, at least leaving aside my color blindness problems with how similar the brown-red-green hues look to my eyes.
• I think I found it to be not that difficult because there seems to be less planning ahead in this game.  Really, you just want to ship as many things as possible and other than train capacity, there are no limits no how many goods you can ship. It’s not like Steam etc. in which your engine level limits how far you can ship something. Here, you can ship goods however far you want, so long as your tracks can reach it. Plus, track maintenance costs mean that you usually want to sell off your tracks whenever possible, so you sort of start anew every turn.
• A lot of Wallace’s games impose some kind of upkeep cost that forces you to sprint just to keep up. It’s a great source of tension in his designs. The track maintenance costs play that role here but they feel weak since you’re allowed to sell your track to the big railway companies and get rid of them that way. It’s as if Steam allowed you to redeem the bonds you issued to investors. Another factor is that the initial auction for influence and most of the track laying is paid for using the investment cubes instead of money, and everyone gets a fixed 12 investment cubes per turn. It’s not tied to the income track and because each player has only 15 cubes in total, you can’t really save much from turn to turn either.
• Maybe the problem with our session was that we weren’t aggressive enough in the auction phase. We didn’t even have auctions worthy of the title most of time. Since each player can only grab two sets of influence max, and there are a total of eight sets available, just enough for each of the four of us, we almost always got away with just paying the minimum cost for them. This gave us plenty of cubes left to build tracks. The bottleneck wasn’t the cost of laying tracks, it was having enough green or red influence to sell the tracks after we were done using them.
• The train renting phase is one part of the game I liked. It’s cool to see the board with all sorts of configurations of trains since in this game, goods and passengers need completely different carriages. Each specific configuration can only be rented by one player, so it’s quite important to get the one you really need or you’ll need to spend extra brown influence to rent more capacity than you actually need to ship your stuff.
• One way to get points is to ship enough to complete sets of goods and passengers. This ended up being the most important for me, but it feels like an odd and not really thematic rule. I guess it encourages players to try to spread around and access different things, especially since the red and the green towns are on separate parts of the map and you need to work to be able to ship both green and red passengers but it feels artificial and arbitrary.
• Finally, since you have no limits on how far you can ship goods and you can’t really build up your railway over the course of the game, the net effect is that the turn in which players manage to ship the most goods is the very first turn, when the board is most full of stuff. Unlike most games in which you start slow and then build up to a climax, this makes First Train to Nuremberg kind of end with a whimper instead of a bang.

All this means that I ended up feeling that I must have missed something, especially since we only used a very small part of the scoring track. While it’s still reasonably fun, I don’t see anything special in this game or why anyone would choose to play this instead of one of Wallace’s many other games. It just feels lacking in tension and excitement.

This is the post where I talk about my Ants bot and its development process. It finished in 71st place in the AI Challenge 2011. You can read about the contest details and the overall results in my other blog. Here is the complete source code in a zipped file. For a while I toyed with the idea of learning Python and using it to make a bot as the game engine and tools are themselves written in Python, but I realized that speed is huge in this challenge and Python is much slower than Java, so I switched back to Java which is still the language I’m most comfortable with.

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Six Gun Saga is the latest game out by QT3 member Vic Davis. Like his previous games, this is a strategy game on the PC that uses design elements and metaphors drawn from boardgames. This one is set in the Wild West and is single-player only. Some notes:

• This is a very modest game. A whole game might take only 15 minutes, making it very much a coffebreak filler type of thing. You don’t get to customize a deck or anything like that. Just pick a boss character and go. All players draw from the same deck.
• A card in your hand can be put to multiple uses. You can buy them, paying their full cost. Character cards, think staples of Western-lore like The Man With No Name and Billy the Kid, can be bought as dudes to fill out your gangs. Property cards, called deeds, can be bought, and usually provide an income every turn. Ambush cards are like one-use attack cards that you can buy to make it harder for your opponents to move his gangs around.

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