#Strategy Games

[prokopetz]

I love it when farm animals in strategy games have their own little pockets of visibility in the fog of war, because the fog of war is ostensibly a visual abstraction of military intelligence-gathering, which implies that the goat is submitting intel reports.

[yellowbrickramble]

Okay so, of course you'll notice a few differences from Lewis Carroll's strategy guide.

In Carroll's playthrough, he neglected to have Alice speak to Dinah before following the white rabbit, so he fumbled the locked room challenge and therefore skipped the seer's labyrinth. Due to a programming glitch, the cake vanishes unless you use the mushroom drink immediately, but we can more than make up for that after we unlock crafting.

If this scene looks familiar to you, it's because I made a couple of animated gifs of Alice back in 2012.

If you like my stuff, don't forget to subscribe to my Patreon! (link in bio)

[cultistfred]

[bossypino]

Muffles’ Life Sentence Episode 2: Odessa Under Snakes is coming 3/7/25.

Wishlist now and get ready for new places, faces, characters, and cards.

[acquired-stardust]

Advance Wars Gameboy Advance 2001

[blazing-butterfly]

FUCK I just dreamed an amazing game and then I woke up and it didn't exist.

It was a videogame that played like a board game, with a bunch of factions vying for control of a dark dystopian fantasy city. There was your classic authoritarian prophet church, a monster-hunting but probably corrupt knightly order, a demonic pyromaniac cult, a greedy engineering guild with clockpunk robots, a plague of sentient zombies living in the sewers, the dying king seeking immortality through forbidden magic... yeah the city was in big trouble no matter who won.

Like in Root there were some universal rules but each faction played differently, for example the church had to fulfill their prophecies and would lose power if they failed to come true, the knights got more glory the bigger a threat the monsters they slayed were which gave them a conflict of interest, the cult had to operate in secret by setting up schemes and keeping them hidden, the guild sold their services to other factions while building infrastructure to expand their abilities, the plague was weak in direct conflict but could easily grow its numbers, the king started strong but would steadily lose strength unless his experiments paid off, etc.

Also, the first faction to cross a certain threshold of power had to choose a crisis, like a natural disaster or city-wide riots or the appearance of a giant monster, and each of those brought new problems for all the factions to deal with. You could try to pick one that would cause more trouble for your rivals and less for you, but there were none that reliably worked in the chooser's favor. In fact, their purpose was to give players who'd fallen behind another chance to grab power in the chaos. Pretty slick game design, I think.

The last awesome thing was the soundtrack, because yeah apparently the game was made in collaboration with a band and they made a whole folk-metal-rock-opera concept album about it, complete with a vocal theme song for each faction. And it was goooood music, some of the faction themes got me teary-eyed because they showed that even though it was a deeply cynical setting there was still hope in this world.

No faction was uncompromised good BUT none were irredeemable evil either! The music didn't get much into individual characters since the game itself lacked those (except for the king, whose song was about grappling with his impending death and wishing he had time to fix his mistakes), but it conveyed that heroes and villains could be found on every side and that most people in every faction were flawed, yes, but had joy and dreams and loved ones and other things worth fighting for, and did the best they could with the deeply messed-up situation they were in.

[devileaterjaek]

Age of Empires (PC) Join our community on //Discord// Support me on //Ko-Fi//

[arconinternet]

Battle Cheese (DOS, Brad Boggess, 1995)

You can play it in your browser here.

[cybergrapeuk]

Have you ever noticed face-to-face conversation feels like real-time strategy games whilst online interactions are turn-based?

[kayin-junn]

𝕮𝖚𝖗𝖘𝖊𝖉 𝖙𝖔 𝖇𝖊 𝖔𝖇𝖘𝖊𝖘𝖘𝖊𝖉 𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖍 𝖌𝖆𝖒𝖊𝖘 𝕴 𝖘𝖚𝖈𝖐 𝖆𝖙

[charonsferry]

been playing a silly game called Voxel Tycoon

basically a combination of transport tycoon and factorio. every time i start playing i continue playing for 6 hours (i do in fact have autism)

[maniacalshen]

I've been enjoying the game Terra Nil. It's a strategy game about turning wasteland into thriving biomes. Turns out I really like strategy games that aren't about war! This tickles my brain the same was Surviving Mars did, except you can complete 1-2 levels/sitting vs working on 1 map for ages.

The picture is one "before" and three unrelated "afters." I keep meaning to take another before picture, but I get too excited to start terraforming.

[sprintingowl]

THACO

Over War is a big love letter to classic console strategy rpgs.

It's also a tabletop roleplaying game, which meant some adjustments needed to be made during the design process.

A computer can juggle weird and complex calculations at a rate faster than a human GM, so you can make a computer do Fire Emblem's Hit Rate + Weapon triangle bonus + Support bonus – Enemy’s (Avoid + Terrain bonus + Support bonus) [%] pretty easily. But a human GM is going to leave if you try to inflict that on them.

So the first thing I did with Over War was decide that there would be no hit calculations. If you're going to be running around with a blob of 6+ characters per player, you do *not* need to also be worrying about accuracy and equipped weapon and armor class and whatnot.

Attacks in Over War just hit, and they just deal their damage to their target. Where things get complicated is in what type of damage they do and who they target.

Default targeting is just whoever is in front of the attacker. But archers can shoot into the back row. Mages can fireball everyone. And healers can (out of necessity) target their own unit. Better, broader types of targeting are more expensive, and there are even ways to change your enemy's targeting. With the right choices, you can turn their big blast-casting aoe archmage into a less impressive single-target poke.

In a game where everyone controls only one character, you might not want to design things this way. Over War's simple targeting and damage works because a player can have five of their characters knocked out and still limp away to heal---and because players can reshuffle their formation and change out the types of characters in their unit when they do.

This keeps players in control and lets them keep making decisions, even when they're in a bad spot.

You *can* still drop the Attacks Just Hit mechanic into a more traditional system, and there are osr titles that do, but this changes the central question of combat from "can I roll well?" to something else. Think about what you want that something to be, and pick something interesting.

[necronomeconomicism]

Victoria 2 is an accidentally perfect game. A focused piece of grand strategy that practically sprinted out of the hands of its creators. I will forever prefer it over Victoria 3.

Grand Strategy games tend to be about playing some kind of state and conquering or demonstrating superiority over everyone else. The topic hitting so close to home, it's usually approached with extreme, cartoonish abstraction. Hearts of Iron 4 is a great example of this, in which the mighty leading men of WW2 are literally drawn characters and there are almost no wartime atrocities. So, so many youtube thumbnails of hoi4 youtube channel guy #468 wearing Hitler's fancy hat.

Victoria 2's theme is economics and colonialism. It's set from 1836 to 1936. So one would think we get squeaky clean sanitized General Custer and Wholesome Teddy Roosevelt. Instead, Victoria 2 is cold and distant. It has no great men acting out the history. No real characters at all besides randomly generated military leaders. Victoria 2 barely has recognizable historical events.

No there are only 3 things in Victoria 2. Resources, Capital, and The State. And Resources includes people and you play as The State. Victoria 2 is a game where Slavery is bad because slaves don't pay taxes. Victoria 2 is a game where capitalists are useless unless you can control their investments. Victoria 2 is a game where Fascism is the best ideology because it provides the most power to the state.

All of this chiseled into code seemingly without realizing what it represents. That Victoria 2 hates itself and it hates the player. I say that in the best way possible. It is a dark reflection of the soul of Grand Strategy. Ripping open the priorities of imperialism and the narrative of the west. Once that is understood it becomes viscerally painful to play. In a fun kind of way. Like a grand strategy cruelty squad but on accident.

[bossypino]

The world sucks, but at least this game is funny.

Wishlist Muffles Life Sentence on Steam now.

EPISODE 2 coming soon.