Earlier this month, we asked you to vote for your favourite strategy games of all time to celebrate the launch (and glorious return) of several strategy classics this month, including Relic's WW2 RTS Company Of Heroes 3, Blue Byte's The Settlers: New Allies and Cyanide's fantasy Warhamball Blood Bowl 3. And cor, I've never seen such love for individual expansions and total conversion mods among mainline RTS games and 4Xs. As with all strategy games, however, there can only be one victor - and you can find out what that single strategy game to rule them all is right here. Here are your 50 favourite strategy games of all time, as voted for by you, the RPS readership.
]]>Every month I throw half a dozen broken shovels at the sleeping forms lying around the RPS treehouse floor. I demand they dig a new hole for the monthly RPS Time Capsule of games we'd like to save from a certain year, and usually it isn't a problem. This time, however, the staff complained a lot about the year choice: it's 2005, baby, and they struggled. I'm okay with it though, because we ended up with a lot of cool abandonware and interesting choices I couldn't have predicted. Especially because, since I got to the Time Capsule first, I got to stuff in the most obvious choice.
]]>Sid Meier, that legendary game dev whose name sits before the names of Civilization games, had a lovely chat with our very own Nate Crowley this weekend, as part of PAX Online X EGX Digital. The pair talked all about some of the most notable parts of Meier's career - including, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates!, and Civilization - as well as chat about his upcoming book, Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life In Computer Games. And thanks to computers, you can watch their whole chat in full below.
]]>Gandhi is one of the most unique figure in history. His adherence to non-violence, his establishment of a full-fledged philosophy behind it and, above all, his success, are practically without precedent. Kings, empires and leaders can often blur into each other. The locations change, the dates are different and the numbers differ, but the essence remains the same. Gandhi was something completely different, and yet games try to represent him with the same pieces they use for everyone else - and so they always make him something far less than he was.
]]>In the words of 60s rock group The Byrds, to everything there is a season. A time of love, a time of hate. A time to dance, a time to mourn. For game developers, this past year has been one long summer of Battle Royale season. Which I guess sort of puts the song into a different perspective considering it less a season than one overwhelming and endless new era. Perhaps fad genres are more like seasons in Game of Thrones, which continue on across generations or until the sweet relief of death.
Anyway, Civilization 6 developers Firaxis have launched a new battle royale mode today called Red Death, and it's free to anyone who already owns the base game.
]]>I’ve been playing Civilization long enough to remember building gaudy palaces that combined Arabic minarets with Ionic columns, and the sight of pixel-drawn Stalin grimacing at me with his retinue of Asiatic advisers. But after 20-something years and untold in-game millennia, I’ve finally begun to feel its insatiable fantasy of empire-building subside. Luckily, total overhaul mods exist.
]]>“Sid [Meier] didn’t know he was inventing a genre back in ’91 - if he had he might have been a lot more careful. He was just making it up as he went along.”
That’s how genres begin. By mistake. Somebody creates a set of rules and systems for the needs of a particular game, and then either people adopt and adapt those rules. Soren Johnson, creator of Offworld Trading Company and lead designer of Civilization IV, is working on a new game called Ten Crowns and after spending almost an hour talking with him at GDC, I get the impression he’s going to be very careful indeed. Not cautious, because I expect some bold reinvention of 4X strategy fundamentals, but careful in his treatment of a genre that we both agree needs to escape its own past.
]]>I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down. That's what I'll be singing when I play Civilization VI's upcoming Rise and Fall expansion. There are loads of new features but the unifying theme is, as the title suggests, success, failure and recovery. That means dark ages that come with hardships but also bring about the possibility of a renaissance into a heroic age. All of that, and much more, is explained in the brand new video below.
]]>In Civilization, civilization is a competition. Land and resources are limited, and even those nations that don't expand through military might are attempting to climb to the top of the league table in other ways. Geography, technology, culture, religion, diplomacy – they're all, to some extent, weapons to be deployed, or at least arenas where an advantage can be gained. Culture and history are the clothes that Civ wears but it's not really about building an empire or a nation, it's about sharpening a knife.
The upcoming Rise and Fall expansion for Civ VI introduces several new playable nations, but the introduction of one civ has led to criticism from an unexpected source. Yesterday, Milton Tootoosis, an elected headman-councillor of the Poundmaker Cree Nation, spoke to CBC News about the inclusion of the Saskatchewan First Nation. He acknowledged excitement about the news and noted that historical chief, Poundmaker, is to be portrayed as working to build “a bridge between settlers and First Nations”. But he also voiced a fundamental concern about the portrayal: “It perpetuates this myth that First Nations had similar values that the colonial culture has, and that is one of conquering other peoples and accessing their land.” It's a concern that cuts to the heart of what Civilization has always been and - I hope - to what it could become.
]]>Jon Shafer was 21 years old when he became lead designer of Civilization V. Now working at Paradox on an unannounced project and on his own historical strategy game At The Gates in his spare time, he says he's learning from the likes of Spelunky along with the more obvious strategic influences. We spoke about how the second half of every Civ sucks, the part the series played in his life, the perils of boredom in strategy design, how much we love maps, and what the future holds for both Shafer and Paradox.
I began by asking how he ended up sitting at the Paradox Convention, in Stockholm, the city that has now been his home for two weeks: "It's quite a long story, actually."
That story begins in Denver, around 2003.
]]>Video games always come with an expectation that the player will suspend disbelief to some extent. Genetically engineered super-soldier clones don’t exist, radiation has never and will never work like that, and overweight Italian plumbers could never make that jump. In most cases, if we are unwilling or unable to suspend our disbelief, we may well struggle to enjoy the game and our questioning of the basics of its ‘reality’ would probably make us insufferable to be around.
There are some games however, where the realities of our world are key to enjoying the game. These are the builders like City Skylines, simulators and sports games like Prison Architect and FIFA, and even crime games like Grand Theft Auto. One genre has a particular problem when it comes to maintaining a foot in the real world yet still creating a setting where one can have fun without becoming mired in morally questionable events and choices: historically based games. And among historical games, few subjects are as complex to represent as slavery. Many have tried, from Europa Universalis IV and Victoria II to Civilization and Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, and in this article I'll investigate the portrayal and use of slavery in these games and more to explore what they get right, what they get wrong, and how games could do better in future.
]]>Last month I spent four hours playing Civilization VI on a very hot day in central London. I came away wishing I could play for another four hundred hours, and also wishing that I had an ice cream. Mint and choc chip preferably.
Since then, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what Civ VI is doing and how its many systems create a brilliant competitive race through history while also producing some weird tensions around the idea of what a civilization actually is in the context of the game. Are cultures defined by the choices they make, by their surroundings, their neighbours, by determination or by chance? Whatever the answer might be, one thing is sure: Cleopatra hates me.
]]>Before broadband and the connected world of information, we found different ways to mix our social life and our games. LAN parties. Where our PCs had a big group hug and let us kill one another in peace. Michael Johnson remembers those times.
Growing up as a PC gamer in the 90's was a curious experience, the dawn of the internet age was upon us, but everything was still a little bit rough around the edges. To illustrate this - try playing the dial-up modem noise to a millennial and tell them that this sound used to accompany turning on the internet and they'll say something precocious like “You had to turn on the internet?” before laughing in your face and stealing all your pogs.
]]>Offworld Trading Company [official site] is the combat-free, trading-centric sci-fi RTS from Soren Johnson, best known as the lead on the beloved Civ 4. It's been kicking around in Early Access for a while now, and both Adam and I rather liked it. If you've been holding off because you fear the unfinished, you may be glad to know that the Mars-set building'n'business game gets itself a full release on April 28th.
]]>These are my personal Edwin Droods. Stories that I've failed to finish, for one reason or another, and that are left suspended. In the manner of somebody reversing out of a relationship like a heavy goods vehicle, trundling slowly and beeping nonchalantly, I'd like to say to the games included: “It's not you, it's me.”
]]>A strange thing happened in the Civilization community r/civ on January 10, 2015. Inspired by similar, smaller-scale offerings by a Twitch.tv livestream and fellow redditor DarkLava (from whom he explicitly sought permission), user Jasper K., aka thenyanmaster, shared the first part of an experiment he was conducting wherein he put 42 computer-controlled civilisations in their real-life locations on a giant model of the Earth and left them to duke it out in a battle to the death, Highlander style (except instead of heads they need capital cities).
Since then, the practice has exploded in popularity. Reddit's Civilization community has AI-only fever, but what exactly is so compelling about watching the computer play a very slow-paced turn-based strategy game with itself?
]]>Once upon a time, Soren Johnson was the main brain behind Civilization IV. Now he has a mohawk. An indie mohawk. Also, he's making a game about managing a crazy intricate (yet disarmingly accessible) economy on Mars. Last time around we talked about how a Mars economy simulator even works, boardgames, and the current state of strategy gaming, and today we continue that discussion with the future of strategy (and its alleged "death"), MOBAs, the advantages and disadvantages of working at a company like Firaxis, whether or not Johnson will ever make a game on the scale of Civilization ever again, and why Johnson is *glad* that big publishers aren't paying attention to strategy games. It's all below.
]]>Mohawk Games is an excellent name for a company. And so it is that former Civilization IV lead designer and Spore man Soren Johnson approaches me sporting the company haircut. It's a recent trim job for the old headshrub, he tells me, but he wears it well. However, the brain beneath the mohawk - the mind behind some of strategy gaming's greatest greats - is the real main attraction here. Johnson's goal is to design "core strategy games" in conjunction with Civ V art director Dorian Newcomb and in partnership with Galactic Civilizations (no relation) developer Stardock.
First on the docket? A still unnamed Mars economy RTS with no units and 13 different resource types. Is it madness? Probably, but it's the good kind, the kind that drives a man to shave off most of his hair before a business conference, the kind that sounds wicked fun when people exchange fireside tales of their favorite matches.
Go below for a discussion with both men about how the game works, boardgame influences, how videogames might be able to replicate boardgaming's face-to-face appeal, designing strategy that's extremely complex but also accessible, release plans, and heaps more.
]]>You might well cheer the demise of GameSpy Technologies, but an awful lot of games will lose official online multiplayer support when the service shuts down on May 31. Publishers scour the battlefield running triage measuring pulses peeling eyelids shining lights flexing smashed bones jabbing fingers in wounds licking blood. "We've got a live one here!" they cry occasionally and haul the game up on their shoulder, but all too often stand up, brush themselves down, then step over the grasping bloodied hand as they quietly walk away.
2K Games shall save Borderlands, Civilization III, Civ IV, and Civ IV: Colonization, the publisher has confirmed, along with their expansions. A dozen of its less popular games will be less lucky.
]]>GameSpy, a relic from times long before the modern Internet - or indeed, games and spies - existed is closing down. This on its own is not surprising as the multiplayer service is, by modern standards, buggy and kind of a joke, but it leaves a startling number of games with their e-wings clipped and their online-heaving hams strung in its wake. How many, you ask? Well, Reddit's /r/Games board compiled a massive list, and the results aren't pretty.
]]>The GDC War Train of Impossible Enrichment trundles on, and RPS is on the scene with gusto, aplomb, and a stuffed lion. Each day this week, I'll be gathering impromptu panels of colossal brains inside frail (but very handsome) human bodies to dissect the show piece-by-piece. Yesterday, John, Cara, Hayden, and I did so by crawling into bed and talking about our socks. Also games. But day two was different. John fell to exhaustion, and Cara was carried away by a throng of adoring fans, presumably to be worshipped and then made into soup. Fortunately I was able to drag Gunpoint creator Tom Francis, writer and camera whisperer Nika Harper, and Incredipede creator Colin Northway over forests, woods, hills, and plains to fill their not-shoes.
]]>Soren Johnson is a clever man. He was a programmer on Civilization 3, the lead designer on Civilization IV, and then he moved over to Maxis to work on Spore. Now he's building himself a new home by founding Mohawk Games, a studio dedicated to creating "core strategy games".
]]>Fellow writers of RPS: you have betrayed me. And on this, the day of love? You wound me, sirs, you wound me. The title track from Civilization - aka The Greatest Gaming Moment of 2005 - won a Grammy at the weekend. It is the first piece of music originally recorded for a videogame to ever scoop a Grammy win. We should have celebrated this. We should have posted three, four, five times about it. Yet no, you did not post it during my absence today. HAVE YOU NO LOVE IN YOUR HEARTS, SIRS?*
It is the song of union, the song of peace, the song of harmony. Come, let us reforge this bond between us! Let us sing it together.
]]>Quite a few people have pointed us at this, and I suspect most of 'em got it from Kotaku, so let's give 'em a link. Brentalfloss adds his own lyrics to the always atmospheric Baba Yetu theme tune from Civ 4. Watch below!
]]>This is a sad one. We reported that the minds behind the Civ ultramod Fall From Heaven were working on a standalone commercial game in the same universe. Well, no longer. Kael reports that the game - "Fall From Heaven Tactics" - is being put on ice due to the funding falling through. I've republished the short Q&A below...
]]>'Art Deco' is basically the only school of design I'm at all familiar with. My own approach to design in any regard doesn't go any further than "make most of the colours the same." So when I see something that's Art Deco, I become slightly excited. I recognised a thing that I know! I can sound very vaguely learned! So has it been with Civilization V, a beta build of which I've cuddled up to over the last few weeks. "The menus are Art Deco," I say whenever anyone asks me what the game is like. Then I nod wisely. Then they ask me about hexagons, and I punch them in the teeth.
]]>In the grand tradition of mods gone pro, such as Counter-Strike, Killling Floor and that unplayable Doom 2 level with 354 Cacodemons I made back in 1995, fantasy-themed Civilization IV uber-total conversion Fall From Heaven is going standalone.
How so? We don't know. With what engine? We don't know. With which publisher? We don't know. WE DON'T KNOW. We know only that it is, in theory, enormously good news - Fall From Heaven has accrued the kind of status that a good 50% of people you mention Civ 4 to will immediately name-check it, so it's not really a surprise that this is happening. There are any number of specialist strategy PC publishers who would be insane not to pick it up. Trailer of the still-existent mod version below, trailer fans.
]]>I've been wanting to give this a proper play before blogging about it ever since Tom Chick brought its "final"-status to my attention. But that's not going to happen until well into next year, and in the tradition of Christmas board-games now is a fine time to sink your teeth into an enormous Total Conversion for Civ 4/Beyond the Sword. So let's blog it now, eh? As Dan Lawrence told me, you'll find information of the latest release here and the actual file from here (Get the file at the top and Patch F a little bit down to be up to date with bug fixes). If you want to get a flavour of it, head to the inestimable Tom Chick's in-progress Fall from Heaven diaries. Those who are confused by words should head beneath the cut to find its trailer.
]]>Woohooheeheehahah. First Beyond Good & Evil 2 and now this. It's been quite a month for shock returns.
Yes, my favourite Civilization game that isn't a Civilization game is returning: as a Civilization game. Civ IV: Colonization is to be a standalone expansion for, clearly, Civ IV. Once again, the aim is the turn-based establishment of the New World, and freedom from the money-grabbing motherland, by conquest, trade or diplomacy and... well, pretty much no more details so far. Well, except for one more screenshot, a release date and a typically chipper Sid Meier quote, which are all beneath the cut.
]]>The Interview I did with designer Soren "Ex-Civ, Now Spore" Johnson in December could be roughly divided into two parts. The bits which were not about Civ 4 and not about Spore. We published these in January, where we talked about the future of the PC being Punk Rock. The second half were the bits about Civ 4, which we publish below, where Soren talks extensively about Firaxis' desires for the project, why Civ multiplayer had never worked in the past, and the difficulties of moving the old warhorse into 3D.
The non-existent part where we talked about Spore will never be published, as it didn't happen. Pay attention.
]]>
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