Review: Age of Empires Castle Siege

My base during the 5th age.

The Wife and I recently picked up new phones, and along with the upgrade comes the inevitable downloading of new phone games.

Over the past several weeks, I have become completely engrossed with Age of Empires Castle Siege. The game is basically Farmville for historic RTS fans. It's a super streamlined version of AoE. You select from one of several civilizations, build up your base, gather resources, upgrade structures and train troops. Once you have an army built up, you can use them to raid other players' bases with the aim of stealing their resources, and ultimately destroying their keep.

The multiplayer functionality is interesting, because only the attacking player is active during a skirmish. The defender must rely on their pre-set defenses. The attacker wins if they either take down 50% or more of the structures, or if they destroy the keep. Though I think the attacker gets to keep whatever resources they raid even during a loss scenario.

There is also a single player campaign that uses pre-assigned armies and will net you big lump sums of resources.

The game uses a freemium model similar to Farmville and countless other apps of its ilk. You must spend resources to construct and upgrade buildings, build your army, and even launch raids, bot those resources take time to accumulate. All construction and upgrades also have associated build times. When you begin the game, most of the build times take a few seconds to a few minutes, but as you progress/are drawn in, they quickly swell to hours and then days. You can, of course, bypass the timers by spending gold, which you slowly accumulate, or purchase at low low prices of real moneys from the app store.

Honestly, this economic model in games doesn't really bother me. It can actually help temper my addiction. Rather than playing for two hours straight, the build and resource collection timers force me to play in bursts: five or ten minutes at a time every few hours. Right now, most upgrades seem to take about a day and a half. We'll see how ridiculous things get once I reach the next age.

There are two things that DO bother me about this game. The first is the clumsiness of the control system on a touchscreen phone. Sometimes the touch gestures inexplicably switch from moving troops to zooming the screen in and out. When this switch happens in the middle of tactical maneuvers requiring precise timing, it can spell disaster for an expeditionary force! I said cavalry advance on the left flank, not zoom out, damn you!

The other, even more obnoxious thing about the game is that it occasionally disconnects from the server mid-battle, and when you reload, you find yourself kicked back to your home base minus the troops you had committed with the win or loss added to your record dependant entirely on where you were in the attack process, regardless of how things were going. Less than 50% you lose. More, you win.

If you're a fan of RTS and/or Age of Empires, this game might be a good way to casually scratch that itch. I find it much more entertaining than the candy crushes and bejeweleds.

Habitat Kickstarter is live!

Hey, so after a minor mixup with KS approval, the Kickstarter for Habitat has gone live. If playing junkyard wars in space appeals to you, I highly recommend you back it! After just a few hours, they are already pushing 20% of their funding goal. Not bad for a company made up of six guys.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4gency/habitat-a-thousand-generations-in-orbit

Habitat: One Man's Space Junk is Another's Kinetic Weapon

In the future, everyone wants your junk... in SPACE!

Habitat is an upcoming space building/strategy/defense game from indie developer, 4gency, and it looks like it is gonna be pretty damn awesome! The premise is thus: The Earth is no longer inhabitable. Humankind has relocated into orbit around the planet. Near Earth space is full of both space junk and trash from the surface that somehow got blasted out of the atmosphere. You play as a team of space engineers tasked with rebuilding a home for humans using the junk you find. However, you must balance your building with defense of your orbital junkyard colony.

Sound fun? It is!

The game is currently in pre-alpha, and they are getting ready to launch a Kickstarter tomorrow next week to fund further development. I managed to get my hands on a development copy yesterday, and took it for a spin. Right now, the game is pretty basic. In it's pre-alpha form, it is entertaining in a way similar to intentionally unleashing Godzilla in Sim City. They are working on the strategy elements, but right now you can enjoy the fun of tearing down your own creations in a whirlwind of lasers, grappling hooks and rockets.

Anyway, I put together a little video of some of my gameplay last night to give you a feel for how this all comes together. Check it out!

You can learn more about the game at the official website Jointhe509th.com
If you want to back the Kickstarter, keep an eye out here: http://jointhe509th.com/kickstarter/. I will definitely be backing it!

Kerbal Space Program: The Silly Side of Rocket Science

A couple weeks ago, Squad released an update to their amusing space sim, Kerbal Space Program. The version .22 update added a career mode feature, which has been directly responsible for a lot of my wasted time over the past couple weeks.

For those who are unfamiliar, KSP is an indie game in open alpha development that allows the player to build rockets to fly little green men (who are likely some genetic variant of the minions from Despicable Me) around a made up solar system. Here's the thing, though... unlike any other space game I've played, KSP uses extremely realistic orbital mechanics. Which makes it both compelling for a space geek like me, but also really hard to get the hang of.
 

First Kerbal on the Mun

Up until this recent update, the game has been a sort of sandbox spacecraft builder. You built rockets from an unlimited supply of parts and sent them off to who-knows-where with an unlimited supply of little green men at the controls.

The new career mode is only different from the sandbox spacecraft builder in that your starting parts are limited. Unlocking the parts in the tech tree requires that you fly missions and run science experiments along the way. This earns you science points, which you can use to unlock new tech. That's it... no specific missions, no storyline. Just a tech tree tempting the player with its forbidden rockety fruit.

Probe landing on Eve (the in-game equivalent of Venus)

Seriously though, career mode was a major game changer for me. When the game was a simple sandbox, I'd fire it up from time to time, maybe put a rocket in orbit, or try to dock two spacecraft together, but that was about it. Now, I find myself dreaming up missions, doodling spacecraft, even calculating delta V by hand! The fact that repeat missions produce diminishing returns on science only encourages this behavior. If I am going to get the whole tech tree unlocked, I need to explore new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no Kerbal has gone before.

Orbiter around Jool (in-game equivalent of Jupiter)

 

Review: Card Hunter Beta

I have been playing a lot of Card Hunter over the past week or so. In case the trailer I posted last week when I released some beta keys wasn't clear (it really wasn't), Card Hunter is a Flash-based game by developer, Blue Manchu.

My party getting ready to battle a bunch of kobolds

The game offers a unique take on turn-based RPGs. While most RPG videogames have you take on the role of the characters in the made up world itself, Card Hunter adds a framing story that holds you one level above the fantasy adventure. Rather than taking on the role of human warrior, dwarven cleric or elven wizard, you are a guy sitting at a table playing these characters in a tabletop RPG run by a dorky guy named Gary with occasional snide commentary from his more experienced DM brother, Melvin. So, it's sort of like Chess Master?

The frame story also ties in the game's money-making scheme. Though it is free to play, there are certain options that can only be purchased with pizza (one of the in-game currencies) and pizza can only be purchased with real money. Gary occasionally throws a few slices your way as a sort of tutorial on how the system works (first taste is always free), but certain special levels, decks and character portraits will require real money to unlock.

The game is clearly an homage to old school D&D. The class and race options, monsters, place names and even the visual design all hearken back to early editions of Dungeons and Dragons. The gameplay in Card Hunster differs from D&D however, in that all of your actions are determined by decks of cards tied to each character (hence Card Hunter). The specific cards in a deck are granted by items like weapons, armor or shields, or by a character's racial or class traits. You can adjust your deck by switching out items, and as your character levels, they gain more potential item slots.

The encounter intro screens have a wonderfully old-school feel

Each adventure consists of a series of skirmishes in which your characters must battle against Gary's baddies. Most are straight up fights, though some encounters have the added option of occupying victory spaces in order to earn points towards the encounter's resolution. Once the baddies are dead, and/or your victory star meter fills up, you win, collect your loot and move onto the next battle. In between skirmishes, intro screens designed to look like old-school game books provide a basic storyline to flesh out each adventure.

The card-based gameplay makes for a quick and addictive experience. You should be able to burn through a fight in about 5-10 minutes, and an adventure in about 1/2 hour. One thing that I have noticed, as my characters have begun to level up and earn bigger decks is that it is more common for me to draw a useless hand. While my hands in early levels, were almost always a mix of movement cards and attacks, now that my decks are bigger, I'll occasionally get a bunch of moves when I need an attack, or several attacks when I'm clear across the room from my enemy. I try my best to balance the variety in my deck, but with no way (that I know of) to reduce the number of cards, the chances of drawing a good mix seem to be dropping as my levels go up.

My center character's deck has 4 move cards and just 1 short range attack!

The levels can also honestly get a bit redundant after a while. While this is good because it keeps the game quick to pick up and get back into, I would love to see a couple more bells and whistles in the final release. Perhaps deadly terrain that characters can get pushed into? or objectives with a round limit to complete? Collectible drops that help forward an encounter? I'd also love to see a ranged attack class other than the wizard, perhaps a thief or ranger.

Hopefully some of the minor gameplay issues like the card mix will be addressed before the game gets out of beta. Until then, I will continue to enjoy my beta test experience. If I get more keys thrown my way, I'll be sure to post about it here, so keep your eye on the blog.

Kids and Games: Engage!

Games with kids: You're doing it right.

Something important is happening over at Penny Arcade. Something that I hope beyond hope will grow, spread and change our culture for the better. The originators of Penny Arcade are both ambassadors of gaming and geek culture. They are also now both fathers of young children.

Warning: some of the links include emotionally driven adult language.

Today's strip relates a recent and alarming experience Penny Arcade creator, Mike had while teaching cartooning in his son's second grade class. That experience has set the wheels of the Penny Arcade juggernaut in motion. Mike followed it up with a blog post about his action plan. His call was echoed by his counterpart, Jerry and on their site's news wire, and now I will repeat it here: Parents, and adults with children in your life, ENGAGE WITH YOUR KIDS WHEN IT COMES TO VIDEO GAMES!

I am not a parent yet, but I do have many children in my life: nieces and nephews, the fiancee's half brother, children of friends. I have witnessed the trigonometric spectrum of parent-child-game relations both good and bad, and I will say that neither willful ignorance / inaction, nor uninformed clampdowns are workable solutions.

Video games exist. Like television and books exist. They tell stories, communicate information, entertain and beg for active parenting. Banning games because "games are violent" is like banning books because you don't want your kid looking at Penthouse magazine. Not every game is Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. However, completely ignoring what a child consumes when it comes to games is just as bad, if not worse.

If you know a young person who plays games, there are several simple things you can do to engage with them and make sure their game consumption is appropriate and healthy.

1. Learn about the ESRB system. It is the video game equivalent of the movie-rating system and provides a handy guide for selecting age-appropriate material.

2. Sit down with your kids when they are playing and talk to them about what they are playing. Ask them how it works. Better yet, play with them!
3. Limit your child's time in front of the video games. The best solution to a kid who plays games for 72 hours straight is a parent who intervenes after two or three hours.
4. Engage with other parents. If your child plays games at friends' houses, ask those parents to put away the games that you feel are inappropriate. If you are an active, gaming parent, recommend games you like for kids!
5. Be the role model your child sees in you. Do not be an anti-game tyrant, but don't disengage and let unregulated gaming take over the modeling of roles for you.

As I mentioned, I am not yet a parent, but I have on occasion, been asked to keep young humans alive and happy for multiple days at a time. When I play games with kids, Skyrim and Borderlands are definitely off the menu. Minecraft, Lego Indiana Jones and Forza Racing, however, are workable alternatives. Ultimately, it boils down to a household by household, family by family basis, but active adult-child engagement and dialogue is far more productive than blind reaction or nothing at all. You're not going to be able to shelter your child completely from the negativity in videogames, just like you can't and shouldn't shelter them completely from negativity in life, but you can help them understand these things and make healthy gaming choices for themselves.

Kerbal Space Program

This weekend, I stumbled upon a wonderful little indie game that blends my current professional focus with my idea of fun, and explosions... lots of explosions.

The game, called Kerbal Space Program, puts the you in charge of building and launching rockets capable of putting little, green "Kermen" into space. You begin by assembling your rocket from various parts in the game's Vehicle Assembly Building. Then you head out to the launch pad to fire it off and see what happens.

The game does not currently have specific missions, but you can set your own goals from completing a successful sub-orbital hop, to reaching orbit, to landing on the Mün. KSP features solidly realistic orbital mechanics which equates to a very high learning curve. After playing for several hours, I have had a couple sub-orbital launches, but still haven't managed to reach orbit. I suspect that I will need to do some number crunching, or at least jotting down in order to achieve that next milestone.


Having spent the past year and a half developing a space exhibit for the museum where I work, I am very pleased to see a game like this. Though the physics are difficult to master, the simple process of tinkering with virtual rockets and blasting them to space or smithereens is a lot of fun.


The game is currently in an open beta test ala Minecraft. There is a free demo version available for download with limited features. If my description sounds intriguing, I encourage you to check it out. If you get sucked in like I did, it is currently just $15 to pick up the latest test version, which will continue to yield updates as the game progresses.

Let's light this candle!

Plants vs. Zombies, D&D-style

Wednesday night I ran an experiment that I have been mulling over in my head for months... I was finally inspired to take action based on this post from Vanir over at Critical Hits. I created a D&D encounter based on PopCap's tower-defense game, Plants vs. Zombies. If you are unfamiliar with the original video game, I'm not going to explain it here. I recommend you check out the free online version at PopCap.

So, how did this work in D&D?

The Set-up:
My players found refuge in an undead-infested wilderness at the home of a druid named Mad Dav. When they arrived, he was frantically setting up for a protective ritual at his shrine to Obad Hai (nature god), but needed more time to prepare. The undead were just moments away and he needed the players to hold them off long enough for him to complete his protective spell.

The playing field:
The undead were approaching through Dav's vineyard. This consisted of 5-foot wide rows of dense vines (essentially acting as walls) separated by 15-foot wide furrows. This set up the controlled rows that would funnel the baddies along in a straight line, while still allowing the use of different-sized plants and undead.

The Plants:
The players were each given a pouch containing seeds for several of Dav's special quick-grow plants. There were 5 varieties in the pouches that the players could choose from. Each had a different ability and a set Challenge Rating (CR). The CR was my ad hoc key to quickly resolving combat and a number of other mechanics for the encounter. More on that later. Here's the specific roster of plants.

• CR2 Slinging nettles (based on Needlefolk from the 3.5e Monster Manual 2) These had a basic ranged attack.
• CR6 Assassin Vine These would choke 1 enemy per round and slow the progress of any others crossing their space.
• CR6 Tendriculous These had two bludgeoning tendrils that could reach 10 feet and a swallow attack that could reach adjacent enemies
• CR7 Ram Topiary Guardian These could bull-rush an enemy back to the start of the row, or until they hit another enemy... whichever happened first.
• CR8 Treant These big guys could reach 15 feet and deliver 2 powerful attacks per round

Planting the seeds:
The players had to move to where they wanted to plant a particular seed and use a standard action to place it in the ground. It took a full round to become active, after which time it could start attacking. After planting a particular seed, the player rolled a die corresponding to the plants CR. (e.g. d2 for the slinging nettles, D8 for Treants.) The result of the roll was the number of rounds they had to wait before planting another seed of that type. Hence, lower strength plants were more likely to be available quickly.

The Zombies/Bad Guys:
I used a mix of undead and other blighted creatures of the type rampaging across this particular part of my game world. Again, the CRs are important.

• CR1/2 (round up to 1) Zombies basic, slow moving melee enemy
• CR1/3 (round up to 1) Skeletons basic ranged enemy
• CR3 Ghast faster, more powerful melee enemy
• CR5 Tainted Ogre large, tough enemy with a 10 foot reach
• CR8 Mohrg (I forgot to put any of these into play, but the plan was that they would move out and spawn zombies)
• CR9 Huge Taint Elemental Big baddie with a 15 foot reach

I was really glad I limited the types of units on each side to just a few different types. It helped keep things manageable. I also selected units to offer a variety of attack modes, sizes and reaches.

Combat:
The premise of Plants vs. Zombies only really works if you have tons of plants fighting tons of zombies. For a tabletop game, this means you need to resolve combat FAST or slip into horrible, draggy boredom. I came up with some very fast and loose combat rules based on each creature's CR. The basic premise is as follows:

If a higher CR creature attacks a lower CR creature, it knocks the lower CR creature out of the game. The caveat being that each creature gets only a certain number of attacks per round.
If a lower CR creature survives to hit a higher CR creature, it deals 1 point of damage to the creature. Each creature could survive (you guessed it!) a total amount of damage equal to its CR. This way, a sufficient mob of low end baddies could take down even tough plants, and vice versa.

Gameplay:
I also had to add some elements to how each round played out. I basically divided each round as follows:

1. Players move, plant seeds and take other actions.
2. Plants attack if targets are in range
3. Existing undead move and attack
4. New undead appear and attack if possible
5. Freshly planted seeds become active for the next round

During the planting and seed activation process, I had all my players act simultaneously to speed things up. I then went row by row to all the plants with targets in range and had the players select which targets were being attacked if there were multiple options.

Players had the option to use spells or things against the baddies rather than planting more plants. They also had a couple NPC clerics with them who could help turn undead and three NPC paladins who could eliminate the front ranks of baddies in a mounted charge down a row.

The players' impenetrable wall of plants bars the press of undead

We went through 6 or 7 rounds of combat over the course of an hour despite a whole lot of pieces on the board, so I felt like the speedy combat worked well. My players said they enjoyed the encounter, but mentioned that they didn't feel like the undead were ever on the verge of breaking through. I think I didn't throw enough at them early on... plus they were hasted, and so planting two plants a round. They managed to turtle up pretty quick.

The Out:
Because this was an experiment, I thought it was especially important to have a guaranteed way to end it in the event that things went horribly wrong or became horribly tedious. In this case, Mad Dav completed his ritual. This caused his tree/shrine to glow with a blinding light that melted the remaining undead and caused a burst of growth in the surrounding plants, sealing the area from further intrusion.

Nerds, in Spaaaaaaaace!

Some philosopher... or maybe it was a super spy penned something about not mixing business with pleasure... and yet, here I go.

Note: to those of you who know the phrase, I am about to Craig the heck out of the following comic/joke.

I am an avid reader of Penny Arcade. If you are not familiar, you probably care nothing for video games, but to sum up in non-gamer layman's terms, the characters of PA are the Siskel and Ebert of the game industry, delivered in comic form with a lot more naughty jokes. Maybe they are actually more like the reincarnation of a nerdy Oprah... if she could send out spores in the form of two white guys even before she died... My point is, they bring a lot of joy and help a lot of people, which is part of why I enjoy their stuff. The other part is naughty jokes.

Anyway, their comic this morning dealt with a topic that I have been bathing in at work for the past year. No, not marketing gimmicks for Mass Effect 3... Space!

Penny Arcade from 2/17/2012

Anyway, I love that the comic brings up the topic of space, however, I feel an uncontrollable compulsion to pick apart the thesis of Bob Mass Effect in the strip. I think it's a wonderful opportunity to teach you lovely readers about the often misunderstood details of Spaaaaaaaaaaace!

To start, the marketing guy says they would like to send a gamer into "low Earth orbit on a weather balloon." Wonderful idea! Totally not possible! Why? In one word "speed" or in three words "not enough speed." In order to orbit, an object  (e.g. spacecraft, weather balloon or frozen gamer) must be traveling fast enough so their forward movement counteracts the Earth's gravity... or rather works precisely with the Earth's gravity to bend their path to match the curvature of the Earth (i.e. they fall "around" the planet) the space shuttle and International Space Station both operate in low Earth orbit and must maintain a speed of about 17,500 mph to stay there. Weather balloon? not so much. This 1954 video from Disney includes an excellent description of how this works... the relevant stuff begins at about 1 minute in.

The other problem statement the character makes is that the final destination of the nerdcicle would not be "space space". This one's a little trickier. If the weather balloon is actually going to where weather balloons operate, he's correct. They typically go up somewhere around 100,000 feet-not actually into space. However, if the assertion is that low Earth orbit is not "space space", things get a little fuzzy. Why? nobody has bothered to draw a dotted line in the sky and put up a signpost reading, "now entering space."

So where does space begin? Technically, low Earth orbit includes the last two layers of the Earth's atmosphere, the Thermosphere and the Exosphere, because the air doesn't just stop... it sort of fades away (and changes into free-roaming atoms). That being said, international treaties recognize space as beginning at a place called the Karman Line at 100km (62 miles) up. This is where the air gets too thin for it to affect wing surfaces. NASA, has their own definition. They assign "you made it to space!" astronaut wings to anyone who travels higher than 50 miles up.

Finally, the notion that someone would freeze solid in space is problematic. Our own internal body temperature prevents the flash-freezing so often depicted in movies. Since space is a vacuum, it is actually a really poor conductor of heat. We use less-perfect vacuums in Thermoses for just that reason. An unprotected human in Earth orbit would likely get a horrible sun burn before they froze. Check this out for more details on what space does to unprotected bodies.

I say this stuff not to put down the comic. It's a really funny strip, and I could totally see a marketing guy delivering that exact pitch. However, I also get frustrated by the frequent miunderstandings and misrepresentations of space that appear all the time in the media, including coverage of EA's actual marketing stunt.