A wargame dev can disappoint his customers in thousands of ingenious ways. Getting the armour thickness wrong on a Panther glacis plate usually works, as does neglecting to model Russian anti-tank dogs, Polish cavalry, and Bren gun tripods. Strangely, one of the least used methods is steep pricing. Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge a game I talked about excitedly earlier in the year has just vaulted out of its halftrack and sadly, the initial hubbub seems to be more about the price than the promising AI advances.
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Posts Tagged ‘Panther Games’
“Why most games are dumb”
By Tim Stone on April 21st, 2008.

Dave O’Connor, the boffin behind the smartest, most plausible strategy game AI I’ve ever had the pleasure to pit wits against, has been sharing some of his secrets with students in Canberra. His hour-long lecture sheds light on many of the features that make the Airborne Assault wargames so singular: the micro-management eliminating delegation system (31:10), the ingenious route-finding routines (36:50), the inertia modelling (18:45), the representation of ‘soft’ factors like leader temperaments (25:30)… If mainstream RTS developers adopted just a fraction of these ideas the world of strategy gaming would be a far more interesting place.
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