Tag Archives: nukes

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

Victory is Possible

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If you keep up with what Paradox talk about you may be aware that they just recently announced a new project, first codenamed Project Reagan and since revealed to be a Cold War-era game by the team who made HoI2 offshoot Arsenal of Democracy. Now, as long-time readers may be aware I have a particular interest in the Cold War or more specifically the aspect of nuclear warfare and policy within it. To this end I’m going to write up a nice long post detailing my thoughts on this development!

At the core of the Cold War, and thus things that need to be executed well in this game, are two concepts. The first is the whole espionage, diplomacy, proxy war side of things. The second is nuclear policy, strategy, brinkmanship, and potentially, war. Neither of these are things that have been tremendously well-implemented in the main so it will be interesting to see whether the AoD team can live up to this challenge.

If the consequences of nukes are only “GAME OVER, and no you don’t get an animation of a mushroom cloud, we don’t reward failure.” then it’s not actually going to be very much fun. It was a valid design choice for Balance of Power, but I’ve got both academic and gamer objections to the idea of ending the game the moment someone presses the red button. Just because nuclear brinkmanship worked out the way it did in our world does not mean it always had to do so, and this needs to be reflected if the game is going to be anything except a history show.

The problem (And this is something that Pox as well as other games always fall down on) is that you really need to model negotiations, both formal ones like the SALT talks and “Comrade Premier, there’s a single American nuclear weapon flying in. It will detonate in the remote Urals. What do we do?” red-phone hotline business. There needs to be the opportunity for deceit – there needs to be the opportunity for back-and-forth – and there needs to be an intensely personal element to it. When you talk to the President about said incoming nuke it matters enormously what you, as the Russian Premier, think of him. If the two of you have good relations and you believe him sufficiently honest, that’s going to demand a much different reaction from thinking he’s a gung-ho senile old capitalist snake who has been itching to wipe out Moscow. As it stands of course the system is Send an Offer -> Other Guys reject it -> Two weeks later bribe Other Guys -> Two weeks later Send the Offer again. That barely cuts it for any of their existing games, it sure as shit won’t cut it in a conflict which should very often play out without full-scale war and where the outbreak of full-scale war itself should provide a massive imperative for emergency negotiations to stop it, because everyone knows where it could very quickly lead.

Also, what’s a Cold War game without storing up trouble for the future?

The question of nuclear targeting policy, and nuclear use policy, is of vital importance. In real history the USA’s policy was to keep European forces relatively weak, weak enough that they couldn’t really hope to stop a full-scale Soviet invasion (this changed as time passed and NATO technology developed much faster than Soviet tech did, and by the 80’s this would have just led to a lot of ruined Red tanks). They also made explicit that they would not rule out first-use of nuclear weapons. The whole thing was a bluff, brinkmanship of the highest order. Perception is more important than knowledge, and your leader’s personal beliefs on the Other Guys is vital. Another issue in the targeting policy side of things is that targeting policy occupied a huge amount of thought on both side. What do you aim at? How much do you devote towards everything? Is your policy to try and wipe out the other guy’s ability to nuke you? To simply ensure your own second-strike capability, so even if every last person in Russia is dead you can still destroy the West? Do you target population centers, or only warfighting centers, and does the distinction even matter? So on and so forth, and nothing about the outcome was predetermined, of course.

It will be interesting to see how East vs. West tackles these issues, if indeed it tries to at all. It’s been a long time since there was a real Cold War game, and longer still since one that took a shot at tackling these sorts of issues. A good Cold War game could be the most tense gameplay experience since the original Silent Hill made us shit our britches. We’ll have to wait and see.

(PS for one view on what nuclear policy should be, you could do worse than to read Colin Gray’s paper Victory is Possible.)

The Android's an Amateur Developer (Ideas), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

In which Mister Adequate works for videogames!

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A sentiment I’m sure many other gamers share is the belief that we could do it better. “If only I were in charge” we think “the latest installment of X would not have been so casual and dire!” Well, I’ve been bouncing around a videogame idea in my head for some time now, and I’m thinking that when I finish my current novel – not too far off now – I’m going to switch away from writing and begin learning how I might make this thing. I thought I would throw the idea out there to see if anyone has any ideas they might like to add to it, or general comments! Anything welcome!

My working name for this thing is An Ancient Evil Has Awoken. The twist is that said ancient evil is you – the objective of the game is to use your malevolent powers to wipe out the human race, evolving from newly-awoken small-timer to Eldritch Abomination. My design document at the moment proposes three main avenues of attack; the inducement of natural disasters, the use of psychic abilities to mess with human’s minds, and finally the use of supernatural events like Biblical plagues or creating zombies or things like that.

I envision the game to play as something between a cross of Pandemic and Populous. You would acquire your resource – tentatively called Terror – through things you do, as well as a slow trickle from the natural disasters (As in actual natural ones) and expend it on causing more death and mayhem. The world would be divided into a number of zones, and as the humans begin to grow aware that things are not right, they would develop more effective defenses against you and eventually could find a way to either destroy you, or to save themselves some other way. Of course the idea of a malevolent god out to destroy humanity is going to be a bit scarier than just bad things happening, so you’ve got a major decision to make; are you overt, increasing terror but making humans more able to resist you, or covert, which gives you a much more constrained ‘budget’ but lets you work in relative peace.

It should be possible though to do things in a variety of ways, and the player should fundamentally feel they are in control of how they are destroying the world. Ideally you would be able to cause an obscene amount of global mayhem without ever doing anything overtly recognizable as supernatural or weird. An economic crash here, a war there, and in the end you can just step in to finish off the survivors.

Pretty much a game where you play as this guy, yeah

What say you, fellow malevolent omnicidal lunatics? Any ideas, thoughts, comments?

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

Don’t you love when a plan comes together

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My dear co-blogger and better half Pike and myself are currently playing a game of Civilization IV. It’s a tech race game, no wars or anything, and she very definitively has the advantage, she has more cities than more, better land, more tech, and more than double my score.

Clearly I need to do something to catch up. So why – in a game with no barbarians – did I build the Great Wall, a wonder whose primary purpose is to stop barbarians getting inside your borders? The secondary purpose, of course! Espionage. See, the Great Wall is one of the few wonders in the game which contributes to the creation of Great Spies, who don’t immediately seem as useful as say a Great Scientist (Who can one-shot a tech) or a Great Engineer (Who can one-shot a wonder), but who really massively boost your espionage. And that’s my plan here. She won’t be able to keep up with my espionage income once I get a GS or two, and then I shall be able to quite merrily run around her obscenely large Russian empire causing all sorts of trouble, like sabotaging buildings, stealing tech, and poisoning her cities.

Rarity only helps put paid to that dreadful Russian fashion, of course.

It shall be glorious. I have no idea whether she remembers that the Great Wall helps with spies, but I sincerely hope not because things are going to get trolly very soon. Also as long as she doesn’t read this post before one gets born. That would be unfortunate. Hubristic, even! But a risk I shall take for our beloved readers, as I leave you with this question;

Do you have any examples of games where you’ve come up with some cunning plan? Perhaps one that does not at first glance seem at all rational? How did they work out for you?

~~

San Luis Obispo IMPORTANT EDITORS’ NOTE FROM PIKE: Although I didn’t see this post until some time later, I saw what he was up to on the espionage graph and cranked my own espionage up to 80%, effectively foiling his plan. Yeah, it was pretty great.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Judgment soon, fellow mortal!

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As we all know the End Times have arrived and tomorrow is Judgment Day, the commencement of the Machine Uprising against our fleshy oppression and dictatorship.

Or something like that.

Anyway so with the world ending tomorrow, what videogames will you spend your final hours upon this moral realm playing? Anyone who says something sappy like “Spend it with family” is clearly not hardcore enough and should be ashamed. Me, I’m going to celebrate the end of the world in reality by ending worlds in videogames!

Yes yes, we all know that I like weapons of horrifically massive destructive power by now. I mean, my cutie mark is a nuclear trefoil, and my main complaint about games with nukes is how ineffective they are and why can’t I weaponize smallpox and yadda yadda. WELL! Let me tell you, my friends, of a game of mystery and legend, a game of science and fiction, a game called Space Empires V.

Best ship design ever put into a game, bar none.

Like too many games I love this is basically Spreadsheets: The Game. The difference is that this one really, truly tries to encompass the scale of futuristic technology and all the awesome stuff it can do. There are a huge, a mindblowingly huge, an offensively, insecurely huge number of technologies to research and as a result, a lot of buildings, ships, and parts to stick thereupon. So far so good.

But we’re not done yet. Oh no no, for you see, other games have some impressive degrees of destruction. Alpha Centauri lets you flatten continents. GalCiv lets you blow up stars. But no other game that I know of lets you construct your very own Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres, and then blow these things to Kingdom Come like a… well, like a wrathful deity I suppose. Where SEV excels is in the sheer giddy heights it lets you ascend to. More than anything else, more than any other game, this is a 4x which demands you advance technologically, and which makes you feel so rewarded when you have done so because you always gain some incremental benefit at least.

And sometimes you get devices that let you construct planets. Or blow them up. And that’s something we can all get behind in our final hours.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Put the cat among the AIs.

Er, or the pigeons. Anyway. What I’m going to talk about in this post is something I expect will be a common theme for me because I find it rather fascinating. That is to say, how AIs act when direct human intervention is absent or minimized.

I’m not quite sure why this is, but I am fascinated by – have always been fascinated by – watching a game do its thing with a minimum of intervention on my part. I suppose this is something that many people do enjoy, given the success of The Sims franchise, but for me it extends into almost any genre you can think of. If there are AIs, I will want to watch them do their thing without me being involved, or watch them reacting to some particularly huge event I set in motion and then retreat from the scene, like some kind of nuke-delivering playwright.

Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with nukes

Here’s the thing: I know what the computer can do to me, generally speaking. I can figure out how it works and unless I set myself particular conditions (Which I admit I usually have trouble sticking to) I can exploit the AI’s inevitable weaknesses. When it’s AI against AI, I can oftentimes see a more level playing field which is consequently quite enjoyable to watch.

Sometimes though, it goes in a stranger direction still. Take Populous: The Beginning. Now, when I play that game, I really get into it. And when I visit disasters on a rival I really like to watch how they deal with it. I very commonly storm in, wipe out everything except any critical buildings and a couple of builders, then retreat and watch them rebuild. I do the same in various other strategy and RTS games. I love watching an AI country/state/tribe/etc. put itself back together, deal with the hardship I have inflicted. Now, I’ll concede, to some extent there is a streak of vicious sadism here. I flat out enjoy knowing that their puny civilization exists at my indulgence. But still, I enjoy watching it work as a system, as an ‘intelligence’ of whatever sort as well as a group of little computer people, a simulated society (However crude these simulations may be at this point notwithstanding).

With broader applications I think systems like this can be very powerful for immersion and enjoyment in games. Though I think GTAIV was a somewhat flawed game, the way it drew you into the world – in large part reliant on building a convincing city to inhabit – was quite astounding and unmatched. I guess what it boils down to is: Watching stuff happen without player involvement can be a critical thing in immersing the player. I’m eagerly awaiting the day when a game comes out where you are just one actor among many. Not in the MMO sense so much as… imagine Dynasty Warriors. Now imagine you’re a regular soldier on the battlefield, or at least the other generals and such run around as actively as you do. Conventional game design wisdom places the player as the primary actor, but also makes the player’s character the primary actor in-universe, and often enough the only one who has agency of any meaningful sort. I don’t agree entirely with this wisdom – I think being part of a larger system could not only serve as a strong method of immersion, but would also make the things the player does control that much more tangible and meaningful.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

Until it is naught but glass

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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.