Category Archives: The Android’s Bunker (Strategy)

Until it is naught but glass

Yesterday Pike and I finished a fairly long game of Civilization IV, which culminated in a nuclear war with Charlemagne, who turned out to have nukes of his own. Which was a surprise. The whole point of a doomsday machine is lost… if you keep it a secret VHY DIDN’T YOU TELL THE VORLD, EH?

Now, something you should know about me: If a game has nukes, I will acquire them. It does not really matter how cost-effective it is, I just need my massive explosives and fallout. It is delicious. As a consequence for this blog, I’m liable to write about them a lot. Nuclear weapons fascinate me as both weapons and political/strategic influences, and the setting of a nuclear apocalypse has its own dread fascination.

However, games seem to have a really hard time doing nukes. Perhaps this isn’t surprising. After all, most people who aren’t Professor Gray have trouble really wrapping their heads around what nukes are and how they function in the broader, geopolitical sense. And we’ve never had a nuclear war for reals so we can’t truly say what the aftereffects would be. For individuals, of course, it would be pretty dire. For the states we are in control of in a game of Civ, it’s another matter. The prospect of survival, recovery, and ultimate triumph is one which an in-game state actor will keep in mind until it is wiped out utterly. (For more on why we get into the mindset of a state, have a read of Jonathan McCalmont’s article about why we act like psychopaths in strategy games.) However, games have a very hard time modelling this concept as distinct from other warfare. Yes, nukes are powerful in a game like Civ, but they are only powerful. They will do more damage than a bomber squadron, but not more than an army that sweeps through and razes everything. Their fallout is unfortunate but ultimately fairly trivial. The long-term side effect of ‘global warming’, which really only means that the world gradually turns to desert, is a more potent one but is no different from the result of excess industrial pollution.

This is understandable for another reason. If a game is not specifically about nuclear war, implementing them ‘properly’ (By which I mean making them more than just more powerful explosives) is liable to be a fairly time and resource intensive process. On top of that there are some general issues with how strategy games, especially 4x ones, are forced to function in order to be playable. If we suppose a full-scale nuclear exchange that wipes out several countries, the entities that emerge from the ruins are liable to be both numerous and highly distinct according to their local circumstances. A good example of how this might work can be found at the 1983 Doomsday Alternate History wiki. Just take a quick look at the number and diversity of entities here. Some, such as the “California Republic” are not too hard to imagine. Others, however, face either the problem that they are not large enough to register as independent entities in a game like Civ, or they are otherwise things which could only be foreseen by a deliberate and ongoing desire to make the game a post-nuclear-war simulator.

Some games come a bit closer, perhaps. In Hearts of Iron 2, when you get hit with a nuke it blows the target province sky high, needing years to rebuild it. It also increases the target country’s dissent, which has a whole host of negative effects; reduced industrial efficiency, reduced fighting ability on the part of your military, and at higher levels, the risk that provinces will be overtaken by rebels who can end up setting themselves up as an independent country. This still hinges on prearranged states, but watching a country like the US or USSR collapse as a bunch of countries declare independence is a much more enjoyable thing, to me, than the simpler example which Civ provides.

So the paradox that presents itself is thus: A game which focuses entirely on nuclear conflict itself, such as the excellent DEFCON, can be a much better model of what nukes do in the short-term than other games. On the other hand, you really need a much more sweeping vista capable of both grandness and minutiae in order to simulate the longer-term effects of a nuclear war. The 4X genre might be more suited to this, but they typically have a much longer timespan to cover, starting at the dawn of humanity. With nukes (Or equivalent weapons) only coming along towards the end of the game, it is understandable that a whole simulation of them and their effects cannot be implemented. The resources simply don’t exist.

I’m not sure we are going to see a game which does this ‘right’ for a long time. However, there may be mileage in a much small-scale strategy game, set in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war and which puts you in command of a single, tiny survivor community. Rebuild the great state of South Dakota! Make Wales a mighty country! Throughout all this we have to remember that what constitutes victory in a game is often a very strange thing. Not least because the whole thing is about victory. Real countries do not reach an end game, there is always a tomorrow when the people you upset yesterday are still around and have to be dealt with. In games there is a definite, achievable end. I’ll refer you back to Jonathan McCalmont’s article for a proper look at exactly what effects this disparity can have but suffice it to say it makes things pretty weird sometimes. I was willing to sacrifice horrendous numbers of lives and cause the eventual starvation of over sixty million people in my own empire quite apart from the war proper, for victory over Charlemagne. The world which was left behind was not one a sane person would want to inhabit, it was a radioactive desert which could barely support twenty five million people (From an estimated peak of well over double that). But the little box popped up saying we won, and so we did. None of the rest of it mattered. There was no fallout – if you can forgive the pun – from the nuclear exchange or the brutal, entirely unnecessary, continued nuclear devastation which we rained down upon the hapless citizens of Prague and Aachen and what have you. Yes, we lost ‘points’ due to a declining population, but we weren’t playing for points.

So I do think that a more comprehensive nuclear war and consequences system within the context of a larger game could be not only enjoyable, but powerful. After a thousand turns a nuclear war breaks out and it truly undoes all your work. Half your cities disappear entirely, the other half rebel, you can barely keep the capital under control. A new fog of war descends across the world, tech is lost, and the geographic effects are more detailed than simply turning to desert. But the nukes would have to be a fundamental part of the game itself, not merely a particularly powerful, expensive weapon you get towards the end. It’s fair that this devotion is not accorded to them, nevertheless I hope one day someone will decide to make the game I am eager to play.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Civ

Believe it or not, I’d never played a Civilization game before Mister Adequate made me encouraged me to get the complete Civ IV pack during a Steam sale. I know, I know. How dare I call myself a strategy game fan, etc. The truth is, I’d always been more of an RTS kid, and I’d never had much chance to mess around on the turn-based side of things.

So it was that I installed Civ IV, booted it up, and promptly began flailing around because I had no idea what I was doing. It was all a very different experience to my typical playstyle in, say, an RTS game, which goes something akin to this:

  1. Get resources.
  2. Build an army while building tech buildings/researching on the side.
  3. Scout around, figure out where the other guy is, possibly send in a small team to distract him for a bit
  4. Build a bigger army
  5. Expand if needed
  6. Attack the other guy
  7. ???
  8. Profit!
  9. Game won in about 45 minutes or an hour.

Now superficially, Civilization follows the same exact pattern (excepting the whole “Game won in about 45 minutes” thing, but we’ll get to that in a moment).  The details, though, and the pacing especially, are very different.  And this really threw me for a loop.  You mean, I don’t tech through the buildings, but through an entirely different system?  You mean your buildings are all in one tile?  You mean your UNITS are all in one tile (or “stack”)?  You mean you can have a game where there is no war if you want?  You mean a three-hour-long game is considered short? And what’s this “Press ENTER to end turn” business?

There was something about it, though.  Something that made me blink a couple of times and then promptly start up a new game when Linux decided to pitch a fit and crash about a third of the way through the game.

And that same something made me start yet another game when it crashed yet again.

By the third or fourth crash it was getting on toward bedtime and I had to tear myself away from the computer because I knew I was just going to keep making new games and stay up all night if I didn’t stop.

Anyways, to make a long story slightly shorter, I spent most of the next day tweaking winecfg and getting it all working on Linux, and once I had done so, oh goodness, I was hooked. I can’t even explain why, there was just something so intriguing and compelling about it all. And not in some sort of carrot-on-a-stick way either. It was just FUN. It was the same compulsion that had me playing Starcraft for hours on end back in the day, or running my clan around the map in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance just so I could have random clan encounters. Gosh it was refreshing to feel that again.

Also: Historical boyfriends.

Another thing about Civ: You can play it as a newbie and do relatively well even if you have no idea what you’re doing, and then later when you DO learn what you’re doing you’ll wonder how on earth you survived earlier. Of course, this game is so deep that you’ll “learn what you’re doing” several dozen times before you really figure it out (if you ever do “really figure it out”). At this point I’ve stopped being surprised when I learn something new about the game rules or how it operates, and I just embrace it instead.

TL;DR I’m a newfound Civ Addict and I couldn’t be happier about it.

P.S. there is nothing funnier than teaming up with a friend and lobbing nukes around and then taking off to Alpha Centauri, leaving behind a scorched and barren world in your wake. *cackles*

P.P.S. We have the best music.

P.P.P.S. Accurate. Especially at 1:21.