At The Gates: Jon Shafer's new strategy game

I like what you're getting at, but it's also a bit like a step function, with such a sharp deliniation between "+4" and "+5"..

What about working in some sort of normal curve?

Man, I've heard way too many good things about that game... Is it available digitally?

That's definitely an option - I know I say it a lot, but almost nothing is set in stone at this point. :) I'm sure we'll learn a lot along the way and make plenty of changes as we go.

The key element is always making sure players know what's going on. If the difference between +4 and +5 is too fuzzy, then how are you to know whether it's worth it to sacrifice something for that +1? Sure, you can assume that it must do something (otherwise why would they have it in the game!), but I don't think that faith has any place in a strategy game. Unless, of course, it's part of a system modeling religion!

This was the aspect of Fallen Enchantress I pushed Derek on the most. I don't like D&D stats where you just assume that strength must do certain things, but the game obfuscates its effects to such a degree that you can't actually figure it out for yourself. I like crunchy, meaningful numbers you can apply directly. I have 100 HP and your attacks do 25 damage each. I can do that math and know how long I have before I need to kill you. If I instead have to calculate your armor class, my hit percentages based on our relative dexterity, damage modifiers based on strength and weapon training - oh, and there's a +/-50% to damage... Well, you can count me out.

- Jon

There's an iOS version, which I haven't tried, but the game is definitely worth checking out.

On the other hand, pretty much everyone not you rips fistfuls of hair out when they have to move an army in Civ5 through a two tile wide mountain pass and attack a city at the end, and you can just forget laying siege to a city on the end of a hilly peninsula.

I've heard good things about the iOS version, not sure if you can still get the original. For a while you could write A-Sharp and ask them to manually make a PC copy, but I wouldn't be surprised if they stopped doing that with the re-release.

I highly recommend tracking down a copy -- it's different, in many ways elegant, and good fun to boot. In particular the way it handles the cultural difference between the tribe you're running and our modern culture is striking.

I think perhaps it's in how you do the fuzziness. Having diminishing random chances of something like betrayal does feel wrong, but you could (for example) instead have a curve where +3 means they'd need one good reason to betray you, +4 would take 3, and +5 would take 6, and no concrete understanding of what a given AI character counts as a "good reason". Maybe with some randomness hidden underneath in how they move between the various levels.

Oh, I entirely agree! Do AI personality traits really fit into that mold though?

Perhaps modifiers for hidden motives (that you could uncover!) are akin to cards in an opponents hand -- they might have concrete numbers, it's just you can't see them right now. Clarity needn't necessarily entail perfect information.

Er, that's how it should be. You're describing situations where historically, small defending forces could fend off huge armies. So what you're saying is you don't want any military strategy at all, and the player with the bigger army should just automatically get all enemy cities. Which is more or less how it was in earlier Civs...

http://www.gog.com/gamecard/king_of_dragon_pass

The iOS-version Raife mentions is a perfect little port and well worth anyone's money. It's the direct opposite of having a transparent system - I have never won that game, I mostly don't have a clue, what my decisions will bring... but it still manages to tell an interesting story based on my decisions.

Count me in the 'Civilization V is the best yet'-crowd. I'm looking forward to this.

True! The 4x-ish mechanics are terribly opaque, and yet work so well with it's character/story driven approach. I'd expected to loath it, and was surprised to find myself greatly enjoying it.

Well done. All the rest of you guys. How could you _not_ have heard that KODP was out on GOG? Gamer credentials revoked.

To quote:
King of Dragon Pass is a pretty big game — over 400 crisis management activities, 75 individual clan leaders, 500 hand-drawn color illustrations, 28 musical compositions. Or you can look at how many words of text are in the game: about 462,000.

They've added another 29 scenes since (to the IOS version), and apparently there are plans for 29 more.

I'm generally very firmly in the consequence and choice transparency camp, and I would say that my main issues with KODP are where it violates those ideas unnecessarily. IMO, what makes KODP work despite its flaws, is that it creates a very defined mythos (even asking you to select critical elements of it) and then rewards you for playing according to that mythos.

As a result, you end up with what is the closest thing to a true "role-playing" game you can get on the PC. You may not have a lot of information to go on, but you can always ask yourself, "What Would Orlanth Do". Most of the time, that is the informed decision..

Because it's perfectly suited for the iPad - who cares about the pc when you're not clicking around and moving your littel soldiers.


(also I didn't know... but mostly I don't care)

You kids and your new-fangled downloadables and IPads these days -- in my day we had CDs, and we liked it.

Now get off my lawn!

I heard.

Like I said, kids these days!

Yes. Historically cities have been able to hold out for over 340+ years of uninterrupted siege without the ability to resupply from surrounding land because it's crawling with enemy soldiers.

Because no other civs had unrealistic relations between turns and years passed - tell me again in which of the civs you managed a global world war in just five years.

It's not a perfect simulation, but building a city surrounded by impassable mountains is a great choice between a very defensible position and a resource rich surrounding. You can't have both.

I never claimed any of the games were historically accurate, now did I?

Anyways, read again: the problem I had was with a peninsula. Siege engines get demolished in a turn even though they are also on a hill in a citadel. Archers don't do enough damage compared to what they receive, though they do seem to last longer and you can rotate them out. Early game ships can't dent the fucker and get killed in one turn. You can't starve the city out even if you stick shit on pretty much all of it's food producing squares outside of the two square bombard range (and some inside that range), because the ones you can't cover due to bombardment are sufficient to feed the city.

It's not a simulation. Not even fucking close. If it was you'd be able to bombard the city without your own siege weapons receiving any damage whatsoever, because actual wall siege engines were generally constrained by the fact that anything too large would collapse the walls under them.

If the situation wasn't so comically unwinable when it ought to be doable it wouldn't irk me so much. However, spending fifteen turns (or whatever it is) shuffling archers in the hope that a city will starve is kind of shitty gameplay.

Yeah, I see your point, but don't think it's a big problem. Not big enough to warrant going back to the stacks of doom of the old Civs, anyway. All civs have outlier instances where the simulation gets "unrealistic" like big wars lasting several 100 years and the new situation, you describe.
But the latter I have experienced less than a handful of times, probably because building a city in such a highly defensive positions means the city has shit for resources - and anyway you don't have to go far down the tech tree before you have ships, that can take cities and deal with these.

It might be possible, but this approach raises some red flags for me. Are you really going to be able to tell the difference between +3 and +4? Unless it's completely obvious, players will shrug it off.

Tying a meaningful effect to each relations level (we're planning on having 40 in ATG, from -20 to +20) without it becoming impossibly messy is no small challenge. What's so nice about chunky level groupings is that it cuts down on what players have to keep track of. "Friendly" has obvious implications, but if I have to remember that +3 does X, whereas +4 does double X plus Y, while +5 does triple Y plus Z... the gameplay might work, but actually managing and using the system might become too much of a hassle to bother with.

I don't disagree. Personality traits can be more fuzzy than combat stats, but you have to make sure you play them up in every way you can: behavior, writing, etc. You're basically just reducing the granularity while trying to maintain the same level of clarity.

Your system becomes much more fragile though, as a single flaw can bring everything down. The first time a "trusting" leader backstabs you, all faith in what the game tells you is lost. That's a lot scarier than distilling diplomacy down to numbers and telling players, "this is how things work." This approach may not be as sexy, but the final result might be better.

With ATG I'm hoping to incorporate features from both ends along with the benefits each has to offer. After playtesting I might swing one way or the other, but it's impossible to say where we'll end up yet. Welcome to life of a game designer!

- Jon

Galleass don't appear until medieval period if you have G&K, before the expansion you had to wait until the Renaissance to get frigates. That is not exactly early in the tech tree.

I'm personally curious as to how Civ5 would have fared if they had tossed in an actual ability for units to besiege and blockade a city. Like making it impossible for a city to work a tile behind an enemy unit rather than just occupied tiles, combined with a significant damage reduction from the city barrage for fortified units. So you could park units and starve a city out if you so chose.

The problem of how to handle small empires I think probably deserves a solution detached from strictly military stuff: like the ability to swear fealty to a larger civilization and get reliable military protection from them in exchange for a portion of your trade/tech/production while you continue to undermine them internally with culture/religion/espionage/diplomacy. With a few specific ways out of the arrangement, or to transfer it to another empire, if you play your cards right and want to take the risk. Thus once you swear fealty the game becomes a bit of a balancing act to keep your liege happy with you, but ideally behind you in whatever victory you're attempting to go for, possibly while you as India play China against Mongolia. So basically my opinion is that the AI needs to just be a little bit less play to win at all costs.

In case there are any non-Windows folks around these parts, I just posted an update today announcing that AtG will be released on Mac and Linux as well (which you'll receive for free with a pledge of $25 or more), and shortly afterwards we'll also be releasing on iOS.

Additionally, our last stretch goal was announced at $200k, and if we hit it we'll be developing an expansion where you can play as the Roman Empire. Anyone who contributes at least $30 will get it for free.

- Jon

Hooray for a Linux version. It might actually become a viable gaming platform in the future with all these kickstarter and unity games.

Linux has a great deal of promise, but it'll be an uphill battle for them. Part of the problem is that manufacturers don't write drivers for them to help patch over issues in the hardware like they do for Microsoft and Apple. And much of the time convenience wins out over everything else, so if the majority of PC-users don't really care about what they use that doesn't bode well.

I'm definitely rooting for Linux, as if Microsoft's approach with the closed Windows 8 store is any indication of what the future holds then PC fans will not be happy campers.

- Jon

How much granularity do you have in terms of Kickstarter feedback? I'm curious if the 200k stretch goal being attached to the Roman content causes a switch from $25 to $30 in the near term, further along, or only if it looks like the 200k is within reach. If at all.

When I've seen that kind of "just above the average buy-in" goal, it's usually been something that is kickstarter only or something like that, which doesn't really make sense in videogames as much. Anyway, I'm glad it's doing well and look forward to more updates about the mechanics as they develop.

All very true. Given that I have to use Linux for most of my work, I hope that the growing support by the gaming side of business (Valve, Indy producers) will lead the manufacturers to come up with driver solutions. I fully expect parts of the Linux crowd to respond with "OMG, untrustworthy!". But there seem enough sane people around nowadays that if this happens a few major distros will emerge that are suitable for all purposes without major problems.

Hey guys, just wanted to shamelessly bump this and let everyone know that our campaign ends tomorrow. We're getting close to 100k and if we keep up the current pace we have a real shot at the 125k stretch goal, which adds more map/game setup options and an Earth map.

If you haven't checked out the updates lately, here are the last few I've posted:

• The social classes system - which was later removed
• How the Romans fit into the game
• The process I went through when founding Conifer
• AtG's unique take on diplomacy
• How combat and supply work

Tomorrow morning I'll be putting up a final update outlining what's in store for AtG over the next year and a half. It should be a fun ride!

- Jon

How could you tease that theme music but not make the soundtrack part of a reward tier?

Haha! Well, the plan is for the rest of the music to be licensed, and we couldn't legally distribute that. The theme music will be available to everyone for free though. :)

- Jon

Interesting stuff, especially with the social classes. I'm curious to what extent modeling what the really durable answers to group concerns in societies look like (ie institutional strategies rather than bribes) would fit into these types of games, but I'm glad you were able to cut out something so dear to you when it outlived its usefulness.

I think you could make a great game out of it, but you'd really have to build the game around it. I feel the same way about espionage.

- Jon

The social classes were an interesting idea, reminiscent of King of Dragon Pass, but I thought it didn't really apply to the setting. Did pre-Christian or early Christian Germanic tribes have an influential caste of clerics? I thought that only applied to the Celts and their druids. Generally I was under the impression that only the warriors, meaning all free men, counted in those migrating hordes. Balancing social classes sounds like something that would fit the settled feudal societies of the Middle Ages but not the earlier AtG era.

As promised, here's the final update before our Kickstarter campaign ends, laying out the road ahead. Thanks for your support everyone!

Yep. It's an idea I'd really like to try out some day, but AtG wasn't the right fit. Better too many good ideas than not enough!

- Jon