Many years ago I actually made the same observation. Real-Time Strategy games don’t really have much to do with large scale strategy, just with immediate engagements. That’s tactics, after all, not strategy - right? Not exactly.

I made a comment about this on Shamus’ blog:

It seems a little silly to try and keep defining down RTS games into narrower and narrower niches. Yes, RTS may be a bit of a misnomer, but trying to deride the genre as being “not strategic” or “not even tactical” is just wrong. You might as well say “Chess isn’t a strategic game, it’s a tactics game” — Which on some level might be true, but it also belies inexperience with the game. Strategy bubbles up inevitably, it’s simply a matter of being well-versed enough in the game (whether Starcraft or Chess) to see it.

What’s the deal here, is it armchair generals too attached to the word strategy to even admit that something they may not be good at (rapid, fine motor skills coupled with high speed decision making) also contains strategy?

Later it was observed that tactics and strategy are two sides of the same coin, or just positions on the same continuum. I can get behind that. It’s pretty common sense, after all, that the large-scale strategy of a war is integrally related to the small scale tactics (and vice versa). It’s only an unnatural preoccupation with terminology that leads elsewhere.

A couple of the commenters continue on, intent on dismissing Real Time Strategy games as not pure enough Strategy for them. The funny thing is, pretty much all of the complaints are just simply invalid. It’s claimed that winning at Starcraft is just a matter of massing units and clicking attack-move into your opponent’s base. No. It’s also claimed that winning at Starcraft is a matter of studying build orders. Again, no.

I’m not good at Real Time Strategy games. I just don’t care for the click-heavy gameplay and rapid fire micromanagement of bases, troops, and control groups to bother seriously trying to improve. But even being only slightly above average, at best, it’s obvious that Starcraft is not won through clicking attack move, and it isn’t won through memorizing build orders. It’s pretty much like claiming that dribbling wins you basketball games. Yes, in the sense that if you can’t dribble the ball, then you’re a pretty limited player. You never learned the essentials of the game, so chances are you’ll get demolished by someone who has learned the essentials.

I don’t care for it either, which is why I don’t put in the effort it would take to do so. But even being mediocre, when you watch high level play in Starcraft or Warcraft, the game is actually quite exciting and highly sophisticated. Yes, the first minute or so of the game are always going to be mining and scouting. But there’s a lot of nuance there — Does a player go immediately on the offensive? Does he harass? Does he focus on upgrading his tech, hoping to out-tech his opponent? Does he try to expand early and secure an economic advantage? And these are just basic decisions that are made every game. What about the map features, the opponent’s race, the opponent’s decisions as revealed through scouting (you did scout, right)?

This may not be a great example, but I’ve actually been kind of engrossed in BladeofAiur’s videos lately (for the past couple of weeks - before these Starcraft tangents even began, oddly enough). Here’s a video of a rather cool game. Probably not the best example of demonstrating strategy and tactics in Starcraft, but good and entertaining nonetheless.

And the second half …

If you liked that game, do check out some of BladeofAiur’s other videos. He does good commentary that helps you understand the stakes and the strategies in the matches. There’s a heck of a lot of good viewing material to go through if you’re interested in watching competitive level Starcraft.

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About two, possibly three weeks ago now I updated to Wordpress 2.5. It was only shortly before that I’d upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 and finally ironed out the kinks between Wordpress 2.3 and my theme, k2. Not surprisingly, when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, k2 ended up having some issues, the most important of which on my end is seeing the nice message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /…/dashboard.php on line 31

Every time I log into the site. Now, from the looks of things, this doesn’t really interfere with my ability to post. But it certainly interferes with my desire to actually post anything at all. I mean, here it is weeks later and the only information I have about fixing the issue is from the k2 site promising a Wordpress 2.5 update “soon.” If the k2 guys can’t be bothered to fix it, why should I?

Of course, I did at one point seek out some information on the problem, but the suggested solution didn’t work. So here we are. Hopefully things will settle down and start working soon so I can post without being hassled.

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So, now I’ve got to decide whether I’m actually going to bother with Battlestar Galactica again. Sure, it was a great show — During the first season. But past the halfway mark of season 2 it really lost its way. The end of seasons 2 and 3 were particularly absurd.

Ronald Moore has said that the writers’ strike gave them time to reconsider their story arcs for the new season. That’s heartening news, since the failings of the show were in the inexplicable actions of characters, absurd twists and retroactive storytelling that undermined its good qualities. Even so, I think I’m going to take a pass on the season premiere tonight until some more information has leaked out. If the word on the street, as it were, is overwhelmingly positive, I may just give it another chance.

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The headline being, “The aliens have landed.” And I can’t dispute that. Who gives the thumbs up to projects like these? Who thought it was a good idea to plop down what looks like a misshapen blob of Play-Dough on top of a glass box in the midst of what otherwise looks like a very pleasant area? I don’t even know what that building is supposed to be.

Here’s another example that I came across recently.

This one is supposed to be a civil court building. Check out some of the comments on the site. The more realistic reactions include, “Crushed coke can,” “squashed cheese grater,” and “toilet for giants.” How about another one: Ten minutes inside 3DStudioMax and a deform modifier. Any fifteen year old with a rudimentary understanding of 3D modelling programs could create this, so why is apparently so impressive when an architect comes up with it?

Here’s another angle:

Probably the most sensible comment so far, aside from the humorous and true quips about this pathetic lump of failure, is this one by commenter “ArchitectsAnswer”:

Is justice blind-to what its supposed to serve, the greater public? I often find Zaha’s work ironically announcing herself as an architect and using her own audacity to bring ‘meaning’ or importance to her work. I am amazed that the renderings don’t include any context of what already exists in this city. Obviously, these things didn’t go into consideration. But how can a civic building serve the popularity of the architect but also address the civic nature of a courthouse? Frank Gehry set up an appropriately pretentious art museum in Bilbao and Madrid is just trying to match its audacity in all the wrong ways.

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around why anyone thinks these are good designs, or, even worse, why governments are willing to blow millions of dollars so that architects can erect monuments to themselves. I mean, I doubt I would want a spaceship sitting in the midst of my neighborhood, but if I were going to have one, I’d like a nice one and not some blob of blue or a crumpled aluminum waste-bin. How about something that’s actually aesthetically attractive, like a Protoss Mothership?

Beautiful colors, harmonious design. It’d be a bit overwhelming in scale, but at least it has fine detail and other elements that relates it in an integral way to humans. As a court it carries a lot more sense of purpose than the meat grinder Zaha Hadid is foisting on Madrid. And all of this in spite of being intentionally designed to be an alien spacecraft.

What a joke.

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I think having a layout that I’ve been reasonably happy with (K2 with default stylings) for so long has ruined my tendency to want to tinker with the blog’s theme. I know at some point I’ll have to go and re-add the AdSense blocks and such, which is fine. But I remember the last time I changed themes I had some pretty elaborate theme ideas, most of which have just fallen off since I’ve had a layout which worked decently and wasn’t overwhelming. Since when did upgrading mean, “Getting everything that was working broken and have to fix it?”

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This one is a classic…

This photo from Maxim is a neoclassic, not just because of the classy Photoshop work, but the wonderful irony as well.

Governmental agencies have suppressed this magazine cover because it proves the existence of alien life.

Definitely something to keep an eye on, though it could use a dash of snark.

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Edit: Well, K2 is back, but images are still screwy, and the sidebars are messed up. I’ll get this sorted out eventually.

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I thought this was a little inaccurate, so I made a better one.

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Reading this, I can’t help but think of my experiences with Galactic Civilizations 2. I bought GalCiv2, played it intensely for the first weekend, played a bit through the first week, and by the time the second weekend rolled around I’d pretty much stopped playing the game (granted, I did get involved on the forums agitating for game update patches). I liked GalCiv2 well enough, but the reason my interest in the game was so short lived is that it was, as Brad Wardell says, targeted for a broad consumer base. The strategy involved in the game was too simple (Obvious example: Attackers attack first, therefore if you build a fleet of ships with all weapons and no defensive capability, you’ll win as long as you’ve got enough firepower to annihilate the enemy in the first turn) to scratch the itch of someone like myself who desired a true sequel to Master of Orion 2.

Anyway, while Brad’s thoughts were interesting in and of themselves, what I actually wanted to write about is in the comments. For starters,

Speaking as a person with a relatively new $15K rig on my right side and an older (3 years) $10K rig on my left, I think I easily qualify as the definitive hardcore gamer and I must say I have not felt like games have been targeting me. This is of course for a number of reasons. The first and foremost is that I have one utterly frustrating time getting all the stuff to work as a system without anything going other then the OS and drivers. Then getting support for the hardware and OS is a major bitch to say the least.

A $15,000 computer? Lets assume for a moment that this isn’t a mistake or a lie. How exactly do you make a computer that expensive?

I paid a visit to the Alienware website to see what the most expensive machine I could possibly build would be. The specs:

Acoustic Dampening Case
1000 Watt PSU
Triple SLI 768MB 8800 GT
Intel C2E 3.0 GHz (w/ OCed FSB)
4GB 800MHz RAM
nForce 680i Motherboard
Vista Ultimate
2 64GB SATA Solid State Drives
2 1TB 7200rpm HDs
4x Dual Layer Blu Ray Drive
30″ Monitor and a 20″ Monitor
Surround Speaker System

So what does this run us? Just barely squeaking in over $11,000. Granted, that’s an obscene amount of money to be paying for a computer and you’re already paying a hefty premium for every piece and the dubious honor of owning an Alienware computer, but even that doesn’t hit $15k. What exactly could one add on that would add another four thousand dollars to the pricetag? A couple more monitors, a gold-plated case?

Aside from being completely preposterous and more likely than not totally untrue, what I find objectionable about this is that it reinforces the false notion that computer gaming requires these huge expenses. Follow the conversation spurred by Brad’s post and you’ll see several people who take for granted that running modern games requires a multi-thousand dollar computer. No game on the market today requires that. Crysis is the single game that might not be able to be run at highest settings with a thousand dollar computer, and even that is questionable.

As much as I may be, at times, the kind of person who complains about excessive pursuit of graphics in games (when in lieu of things like story and gameplay), it’s time to stop complaining about hardware costs. It’s just not valid to claim you need a $3000 computer to run the latest PC games, or a $400 graphics card that you upgrade every six months. These assumptions have become so mythical that they’re taken for granted. It’s time to put a stop to that. Today’s Triple-A computer games are probably the least demanding of high end computer hardware of any that I can remember. Maybe if there weren’t so much misinformation flying about people would be able to make more informed purchasing decisions.

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