March to War Month: XCom 2

The original X-Com, which I'll call X-Com OG to try to be easier to read, is permanently lodged in my brain. I've played hundreds if not thousands of hours of it, and through at least one successful campaign of its sequel, the highly derivative Terror from the Deep, or Lobster men from the Ocean rise from the depths to touch your no-no zone.

I couldn't get into the XCom reboot, as it felt too close to X-Com OG while not offering much, if anything, to really get over my subjective distaste for the game. It reminded me too much of the usual dumbing down of strategic games, but it sold really well and lots of people liked it, so I'm not saying I think it's bad. Just, you know, it didn't quite line up with it. It's still very cool that they made a triple A big budget strategy game, even if I'd somewhat pull away from calling this a strategy game.

As for X-Com 2, the reality is, I have a 12 month humble bundle sub rolling and I was getting this game whether I liked it or not. Having clearly put the money in, well, I wasn't going to be deterred on giving it a try and wasn't going to be deterred by the first hour being bad since damn it, they already had my money.

March to war month: The Last Federation

Some games are easy to introduce and discuss, and others are difficult. But Arcen, makers of Last Federation, is generally a well-spring of being difficult to discuss in and of themselves, and then their games take it to the next level. Admittedly the last Arcen game I reviewed was Starward Rogue, which was a very different game.

The Last Federation is a very, very strange game to talk about. It bends a lot of what you'd expect from the genre around trying to set up this one, rather perfect little scenario that the game takes place in. But I guess I should explain the genre before I go anywhere else. TLF is a space simulation game, likely to be compared to the lineage of Master of Orion. However, if MoO and its variety of descendant games are described as "4x" games (or x4, I can never remember) then TFL is more like an 2.5x game. Most of the elements are there, but not all of them.

For one thing, the basic story is you're the last Hydral, the first race to gain space travel in a planetary system with almost ten different races. And your race was wiped out, as they were cruel dictators of the system until that wiping out. It isn't well explained why a space-faring race would be wiped out as such, but hey, it worked for Dragonball Z!

As the Last Hydral, you don't really have an empire per se and you don't really have anything approaching imperial resources. Oddly enough, though, the elements you'd expect to be dropped from a 4x given those restraints aren't the ones TFL is missing.

Back when two thousand was the FUTURE: SimCity 2000

All that hootin' an hollerin' about simcity got me inclined to playing the version of simcity I knew best, then the version of simcity others claim is the best. This isn't precisely a review or a nostalgia trip, but a brief discussion of SimCity 2000, which was made when you labeled everything as TWO THOUSAND because in 95 we didn't know what cool was.

Rob Liefeld art. Look it up. Argh.

building straight out of Doom or something

More specifically, Simcity 2000 was released in 94 for the platform I played it on - DOS - and is part of a family of "Sim" games I'd played as a kid, which included SimAnt (which was, in retrospect, stupid), SimLife and SimEarth. If you ask me to differentiate between Life and Earth I ... I don't know. The one of them had Gaias, starfish people and ... uh, something about weather zones. Evolution!

Ahem.

SimCity 2000 is probably the high point of that generation of games. Life and Earth were certainly deeper and more ambitious, but there's always been a hard limit to how far Sim games can go. Look at Spore. You need to sort of define the box, and this was the game with the box that made the most sense. You build a city! It's also vaguely educational, though not in the way people like to pretend it is.

So I fired it up and built me some cities. Nostalgia won't take you too far, and Simcity 2000 actually doesn't need all that much nostalgia. The GoG.com dosbox version runs pretty well (certainly better than SC4) and surprisingly looks pretty pleasing. Look at those sprites! Gorgeous! They've certainly aged better than most SNES games, which look a little off nowadays. The game is pretty and it has nice trees, and traffic is rendered in a good little shortcut. Honestly the little ever denser black dots while very simple are an elegant way to convey the information. This game would run on my 486, a PC which I believe has the same processing power as a modern oven clock.

SC2k is actually pretty shallow and hilariously nonfunctional in a bunch of ways. The three zoning types have two different densities which on the most part have no difference other than costing you an extra $5. I think that commercial dense doesn't cap value, while light does, and then light residential/industry has some advantage where you get less people slash jobs but you end up with better land value? On the most part though, it doesn't really matter. Anyway residential is where people "live" and then you must make traffic connections through commercial and onto industry to get your city to grow.

As a child I picked up pretty quickly that there's some sort of voodoo barrier insofar as commercial vs residential: You must have commercial zones near residential otherwise people just won't stay in the residential areas. I could never quite figure out how far you're allowed to go, but they needs it man. It's kinda awkward since Commercial demand is always the one you wish you had more of, and you want to use commercial to provide barriers for the industrial smog zones. But you need to push it back and damn it residential, why you gotta be so close to the store?

Once you get past the basics - you power the lots, people build some chemical plants, workers move into the Residential zones and then someone builds a grocery store - the game starts throwing the larger "challenges" at you. It's funny watching how a bunch of these things barely seem to work or act all weird. Large scale commerce and industry ask for air and seaports, respectively. Airports break constantly if you don't turn disasters off, unless you put them miles out into the countryside, at which point you benefit less from them. Otherwise its a constant spew of planes crashing into tiny little buildings. Commerce also likes to demand airports when the airport is there, but hasn't been "taken" yet as for some weird reason its a form of "zoning". Seaports usually work fine, which made me favor seaports.

Except sometimes they'd be covered in warehouse. No ports. Just storage space. Right on the water! At least I don't have to turn the sound off because the planes keep crashing and its driving me nuts.

Traffic is the one that always gets me. I mean the thing where the water system doesn't work because your city is so big, that's pretty weird. Like you'd have "enough water" but there are water outages? It's a little strange. You'd think people would be complaining nonstop about it.

Pardon my terrible chart

Anyway so traffic, traffic is the funniest. See, in the original Simcity, the answer to traffic problems was to build nothing but rails. People would just ... take the train hobostyle, and not need roads, and life was good. Doesn't work in this game. Well, it kinda does, but I'll talk about why it mostly does not. Traffic works like so:

The basic jist here is very close to real life, except for two big things: the first is that traffic, in real life, generally follows towards heavier demand capable roads and avenues. In SimCity 2000, people just drive wherever because their pathing AI (which is sort of a misnomer, they don't really path) has no discretion. Highways, as best I can tell, don't work at all like you'd imagine they do. I think people just drive on them if they happen to be there. It would certainly explain why highway terminations have traffic on them past the last onramp - which is to say people are just, driving off the edge or something.

The other thing is, sims (as you can see in my pictures) take exactly 3 tiles to get to a method of transportation. If roads are available, they're always at least fine with that. The issue is actually better defined with an image. Say you have a subway station sitting in the middle of that plot above. It does nothing.

Ok, that being said, say you have two subway stations. Sims will enter and exit a subway in the exact same way as shown below, assuming you build a subway beside a road right? I mean that's what people do in the real life!

So of course, you need a ton of subways to cover the city in order to alleviate traffic problems created by sims driving willy-nilly wherever they'd like, over dirt roads and through backwoods. Of course you pick up that Sims will not drive to mass transit, at least not as far as I was ever able to tell. So subways are best planted in those very backwoods, allowing sims to access them. Trains and buses are rendered pretty useless as well, since they require another connection to work at all (as above, you can see you're giving up five of the 24 slots by having the subway by a road)

Except there's one problem, of course. I have two pictures of 'train stop' a little village I set up to try to test out the mass transportation issues that the game has. It seemed like ever when blanketed with mass transit to every corner of my fair cities, I'd still have constant traffic issues. What you can't see in that picture (because the game never tells you at any point) is that mass transit works on a percentile chance. So a Sim not only needs mass transit to interconnect the two zones it is utilizing, it then makes a check to see if the sim is willing to use mass transit even in the absence of any other means to get around!

And how, you wonder, do you increase the chances of them using mass transit? Apparently the stupider your sims are, the less likely they are they'll go on a bus. Since the simulation doesn't have any ability to tell the difference between wealthy or poor sims, everything is just a chance. I don't really know what the specific chance actually is or if you can even get it up to any reasonable amount. Since a sim is unwilling to take the chance unless there's mass transit at their destination as well, you still end up with a ton of sims driving even though you have 1 subway station for nearly every 30 zoned lots. It's enough to make a city planner bitter about the traffic woes! Of course, you could just build more roads right? Then you end up with this guy telling you that you've got too many roads!

Of course, ultimately, this isn't a big deal. The city still grows and you can still build your nightmare cityscape of twisted arcologies so you can cram millions of simulated dead souls in your 2 by 2 km block of traffic jams. It's just sort of funny to look at how water, traffic and all the other issues that the mid to late game throw at you don't really work all that well.

Is the game fun? Actually, I'm surprised EA never realized they could just sell a facebook version of this game. It's very simple when you get right down to it, which never gets in the way of just building vast cityscapes. Instead they made Simcity (2013) which uhh, man I do not understand that one. But I'll come back to that later.