Transcript
Speaker: So, hello and welcome to this ah next episode where we're going to talk about maps. We're also going to talk about geography. We like maps. I don't like trains, but I do like maps. Now we have my personality down.
Speaker: Apart from me, Andreas Eriksson, we also have um the the rest of the co-host with us, Johan. Hello and welcome. um Well, thank you so much. I mean, it's lovely to be back. I think we have had two solid episodes before this one and can't wait to start digging into maps, terrains and armies on maps. I mean, this is one of the reasons we play strategy games. I mean, maps.
Speaker: Yes, maps. That's the whole thing. Yeah, I definitely think so. I'm going to ask you a question, Magnus, but just going ask you a question as a starter here, because I know got into maps because I started reading fantasy books when I was a kid.
Speaker: i presume that you one that did the same thing. And if you read fantasy books as a kid, you know the map is the most important part of the book. Thereafter comes the story. No, thereafter comes the magic system, and the third is perhaps the story.
Speaker: What about you, Magnus? How did you get into maps? No, 100% military history. I was a military history kid. i I mean, I like fantasy as well, but I got into it through like Redwall books. And I'm not sure they were a huge thing outside of the UK and Sweden.
Speaker: ah But military history, I started reading that way too young. And for those of you who are not Swedish, because we're all Swedes, there's always this little part of you, especially if you're interested in kind of military history, i.e. a man, ah that you start reading military history a bit too young and like,
Speaker: Oh, Stormaktstiden. The glory days, 1600s. Gustavus Adolfus. I think that's a super fascinating thing. ki yeah i think I think that at about age 12, I've been reading this for a few years, and I could trace a map of every every campaign of Gustavus Adolfus on a map of Europe.
Speaker: ah it It sounds sick, but that's how it is growing up you know in Sweden in a household with a lot of books and a lot of popular history books.
Speaker: Kind of sounds like we need to get a collaboration going withlixis story problem with with Per and Mattis for this, basically. Yeah, I think they'll agree with me on this. Also, shocker that I'm a Paradox gamer now.
Speaker: This is why Sweden is totally overpowered in the Paradox games. It's not just it' not it's not that we're really proud Swedes. it's it This is how we got into history. Very, very true.
Speaker: I did it the wrong way around. I also read a lot of um war history, but I'm... I'm a political scientist by training, and I guess it's rooted in this because I liked the the books that weren't about like the battlefield. I liked the books where they, for some reason, talked about how the state was made and like ah they did did the Axel Oxenstiernas policies and stuff like that. I got into that way too early, like the court drama.
Speaker: And it also means that I have a fairly good idea what happened during the entire battle of Breitenfeld. but I couldn't paint it for my life. I still have somewhere in the back of my head the the number of thousands of cannons they captured, but I can't paint it out anyways.
Speaker: Yeah, well, that's fun because that' that's usually where this kind of boyhood love with ah Swedish military history ends when you realize that, okay, and so the state was dysfunctional but better than their neighbors and everyone had the plague and died and everything was horrible.
Speaker: Yeah, they used to say, oh sorry, Johanna, you want to name it? Yeah, no, I just want to kind of make make an alteration with this. Yeah, sure. if You have your history. You have all of that.
Speaker: I'm a war gamer. I mean, try playing Warhammer 40k or Warhammer Fantasy Battles or miniature war games without terrain, without maps, without battles, and just play it on a plain table without a hill or anything. You save so much money that way.
Speaker: ah ah Yeah, you do, but it's not not fun. i mean, it's not fun. i come from that part. And sure, yeah, fantasy, it's great. i all I love to look at the maps. Yes, the Battle Breitenfeld. could probably paint that one out, Andreas, just to give a bit of a situation to you.
Speaker: But yeah, no, I... I come from the wargaming community and you, you need terrain, you need maps. ah Otherwise it's, it's no fun. yeah sure. You can put it up on the kitchen table, but then you have two firing lines and free rain for cavalry. And where's the fun in that? That's no strategy. It's a bomb rush.
Speaker: Yeah. Okay. I'll give you that. So before we move on, ah wanted to say something because in a previous episode, i may have inadvertently, um,
Speaker: been wrong. ah while i claim Where I claim that like it's hard to have a strategy game without having war. and I know, I almost apologized for it during the episode. i know that I'm wrong about it. It's obviously I'm wrong about it.
Speaker: Because you can just have the strategy of something that is not a war. But... I have also been thinking about how I was actually right. And there is something thing there that I wanted to just ah throw throw in into the ring before we move on and talk about geography and maps.
Speaker: And it's the fact that death I do actually think strategy games needs conflict. There has to be some kind of opposition against some kind of opponent, which is not just nature ah where you somehow...
Speaker: try to do things that harm them and they harm you back. If you don't have that, i think you have a city builder or a survival game. Yeah, Andreas, we all know that you're wrong, but you need to keep this i mean this this ridiculous line of reasoning. Otherwise, we have to concede that a football manager is a strategy game and none of us wants to do that.
Speaker: Exactly. I want to do that. I want to do that. i mean, technically you hurt someone with Football Manager yourself. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you do. You hurt yourself. You hurt your spouse. You hurt everything in your life with Football Manager. So you have a real internal conflict there.
Speaker: But I mean... I'm very happy that you concede this point happily. I just have one game that I would like to throw up there. but We're not going to stay in that one, but I mean, Dwarf Fortress.
Speaker: Strategy game or City Builder, Andreas? City Builder. Okay, fair enough. We're going to have a conflict about this later, but now we're going to talk about maps. Yes, maps. So...
Speaker: um As I said, I like maps. I don't like trains. But but like maps is one of those weird sort of fixation hobbies that tends to move into this weird space between people reading fantasy, people liking strategy games, people liking war games.
Speaker: And... like both the map in itself and the terrain you play on is an immensely important part of almost all the strategy games. You you rarely find a strategy game where terrain doesn't matter.
Speaker: And even when when it doesn't matter in the sense that it doesn't have any impact, just the fact that distance exists between players is important. And I find it's really interesting because I don't often hear any conversation amongst gamers about what the map and the terrain is about, what is good, what is bad.
Speaker: this is going to be something we talk about. before we move on to that, I also want ask you, is there anything you think should be included? What can't we miss out on when we talk about what is essentially geography in a game?
Speaker: Well, For me, it kind of depends on what the game is. I mean, if we look at a Total War game, and we just need kind of the map, you know, cities, rivers, roads, etc., mountains, hills, but blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: But if we look at, for example, Hearts of Iron 4, they include sea zones, they include a zones. So it's it's kind of... and I'm not saying they're doing this great. Sea zones, absolutely. Air zones are...
Speaker: we We had a discussion before we started recording this about yeah the air zones. But I mean, it's kind of what do we try to represent with this map? that's That's kind of, from my point of view, that's kind of what narrows it down to what should be included in the map.
Speaker: And for me, I think sometimes less is more in this. I don't know if you agree with me here, Magnus. Well, I kind of do. ah One of the things I wanted to talk about is like the charm of old old RTS strategy games and tower builder games is that they had a very simple geography and that was probably for the best.
Speaker: I mean, most of the terrain features you saw were pretty pretty much just make a cute cute map. ah And very little of it really impacted the gameplay, impacted how your units moved or how the enemy units moved.
Speaker: And that was probably for the best. I think a lot of things that bother me about geography or mapping in strategy games is when game... games and developers try to kind of take that next step and include, it okay, so now we we've we know how we handle roads, rivers. and Now let's see how we handle different kind of terrains, grassland, woods, for example.
Speaker: Let's see how we handle air zones. Let's see how we handle attrition over a map. ah These kind of things that really impact unit movement or logistics. ah And usually that that that's what but that has bothered me over my gamer life when they try to kind of integrate a new kind of terrain feature.
Speaker: in the game map, and they just can't out. it just it's It's bugged, or it's unreasonable, or it's annoying. And there is a charm to these old, very simple games. They're always like, you can move here.
Speaker: You can turn this corner. You can go into this hex, but not into this hex. The old Civ games were kind of fantastic that way. They're like, OK, we have these hexes. There are very limited amount of terrain modes and these in these hexes.
Speaker: ah You can't move across water unless you're a boat. And that was fine. but That was like, it was layered, but they didn't try and make it too complicated.
Speaker: I think that it's interesting. I was thinking about this ah for a while, and ah something that strikes me is that you you generally have... a lot of different levels of terrain in a game. and my My favorite example is probably how the Total War games have essentially a minimap, an overworld, and a battle map that is generated um I think Bannerlord Mountain Blade has something like that then you have ah one of the games I think is the cooler games that I don't actually like to play Planetary Annihilation which essentially has planets and maps of planets and you play on that planet it also has space straight up it's not on a map that's where all the dangerous stuff is hiding but but like they have it um
Speaker: um so So it's not as simple as just talking about terrain as the place you move your people or units or whatever and the playing field and then the minimap being essentially an illustration of that ah terrain.
Speaker: in many In many games, they also like try to model it one step down, one step up. I think it's ah ah some games like Heroes of Might and Magic Legs to have like an under underground area, which is essentially just another map under the previous map.
Speaker: ah There are a lot of ways that they can do terrain, which makes it hard to just like dive into it and talk about that terrain you play on ah So where do we start? Yeah, well, just to add on to that, I mean, we we have Paradox that does a lot of great grand strategy games. ah Usually it's the, you have the world map in Hearts of Iron, you get sea zones and you you get air zones.
Speaker: But then you also have Stellaris, where the kind of askew of the planetary map, it's all space. What happens on the planet, thats that's not important, because it's such a small part of this space empire. and Wormertal War, and for example, they have, you can travel in the underworld, the underworld map, and you can intercept, but you never see it.
Speaker: It just gives you movement that is unrestricted. It's like a wormhole, or Yeah, it's kind of like a wormhole. You can move from here, yeah on the map from point to the map, to point Y on the map, and you can pass, well, mountain ranges that are impassable terrain. But you can also get intercepted, then you get a little battle, but you never see it.
Speaker: But here's a mighty map, they layer it map upon map, and you do that in certain places. ah Paradox Games, forgot the name of that particular Paradox Game, but you have an overworld and an underworld, which is quite cool in its way, but it
Speaker: it's always hard to differentiate what should we have in the map. And I mean, planet annihilation, yeah, sure, you you fight on the ground, but all the dangerous stuff is above you in space.
Speaker: and And you don't really see that right now. and I think that's beautiful. I have an idea for this position. because Before we kind of move on, i mean, to my point that you can ruin a game by adding ah terrain feature or like um or something that that doesn't track. You mentioned that when we were talking about the worst games ever, about the Star Wars game, where they're tried, added, not not spaceships, but flying vessels.
Speaker: And they basically, like, god yeah so this is just a cavalry unit that does weird things. And that just makes it horrible. It it kind of it it bugs up the game. bothers you as a player. it breaks your suspension of disbelief in the game.
Speaker: And I think that's the that's the worst thing about when when you add geographic i mean you add layers of geography or kinds of geography that don't track with the rest of the game.
Speaker: And I think we'll get into more examples of that. On the other hand, I said that I like the clean cut feel of old strategy games and old RTS games. I also think it's just so cool with more modern games where you can really, you can see that they're they're trying to really model, for example, a real time battle.
Speaker: As it would be in the real world. and For example, Steel Division 2, where you can you can click on your units and say, okay, so what field of fire do I actually have? And it's not just, okay, so I have from 60 degrees to 180 degrees, so but it actually layers in for each individual unit.
Speaker: Okay, so what can we see and what can we shoot? And I love that. I love that that. They actually factor in that you can't you can't fire a machine gun through but through a bunch of trees. You can't shoot over a hill if you're an infantry unit.
Speaker: ah And I do love that. it It just gives you so much more immersion. And I think that's that's geography well handled. Mm-hmm. Yes. And I'm actually going to try to dive us into that. So I have and a slight idea how we're going to structure this conversation. And we're going to go from smaller to bigger.
Speaker: So we're going from essentially like the generated battle maps first. And then we move on to like the general like just the where world you play in. And then we go to the mini-maps. And I have an opinion immediately. So soer one of the best uses of a battle map...
Speaker: I have ever seen is in the old game Total War Rome. In Total War Rome, they actually try to generate the location you're at when the battle starts.
Speaker: So if you move your hero on the overworld or your army on the overworld and you encounter another army, the game looks at like how does the terrain on the normal map look? And then it tries to generate the same ah the same hills, the same rivers. It even tries to generate the backdrops as faithfully as as possible.
Speaker: And it creates a lot of unique terrains. In later Total War games, they sort of keep it, sort of drop it, so you don't play the exact position. ah Like if you stand on a mountain slope in Medieval, there's going to be a mountain slope on the map, but you might not be standing on it.
Speaker: And in later games, you just fuck it up but entirely. um that is like the best use of a generated battle map, I think, still to this day. But then there are so many other ways to do battle maps. And some are good, some are bad, and some of them are card games. ah So, opinions.
Speaker: Yeah, let me just dive into that and say you're wrong. I know what you're saying. And I mentioned in an earlier episode that Roman's World War really got me into strategy games because i thought that precisely this feature was kind of cool.
Speaker: But what you really realize after a while is that they're not trying to render the ah map. it's It's a small number of basically kind of the same ah battlefields. You get pretty much the same thing after a while.
Speaker: And you also realize that Yeah, we're not renting what's on the battle map. For example, um i I was standing next to a river, but all of a sudden i'm I'm at a river crossing that does not correspond to the map. It's still a river crossing. It's a bridge, but it doesn't correspond to the map where I thought it was going to be fighting.
Speaker: they I think they managed to nail this a lot better in Napoleon Total War. ah Because I think you're right in that they've kind of dropped this ambition after a while. But Napoleon Total War, which I maintain is one of the best games in the series, they render this a lot better. And they also use terrain better. you get terrain features that you don't get in other Total War games.
Speaker: And that might be one of the few cases where they have... manage to render battle maps that are so good and so diversified that they actually break up one of the big problems with from total with the total war series is that basically you fight battles the same way line up your units flank the enemy and In Napoleon Total War, there are cases where you just can't do that because the battle map is too spread. up For example, if you're fighting in ah close to the Alps, so you get a spread-up battle map, you get big rocks in the middle of the battle, and that means that, okay, i can't just I can't just place my units on a big line like I usually do, which is kind of like the auto-win go-to for lazy Total War players.
Speaker: You have to actually think about how you place your cannons, how do you place your infantry, and so that you can meet the enemy effectively. ah It's sad to think that they might have gone, they might have regressed a bit after Napoleon Total War.
Speaker: But that's also one of the points why I think that Napoleon Total War is one of the better games of the series, so that they use the geography. ah kind of like the map of Europe to random battle maps that are interesting enough that they force you to change your tactics.
Speaker: And i think that's a good use of geography.
Speaker: It's cool what you say. yeah You both have very valid opinions and in the in the sense of it Total War games, you're both wrong and we're going to get back to that in another episode.
Speaker: But um was yeah I was kind of thinking about steering away from Total War games because one of the games that I find really does this well, I don't know if you've played them, but every close combat game does this really, really well when you get down to tactical level, because they have they were kind of the, for as far as I know, to my knowledge,
Speaker: and They were one of the first games that used fields of fire. you could you You clicked on your squad, and be them American or Russians or Wehrmacht or whatever, and you saw what can they shoot from here, how effective are they at this range.
Speaker: But they have also done this. They've studied old maps. This town looked like this. We had a hedgerow here. We had a river here. We had to yeah we had a square. We had a farmhouse.
Speaker: And they got you down to that thing with this farmhouse is really bloody important to me to get my machine gunners into it. It's really bloody important to get my bazooka team into this to destroy the panzers coming up.
Speaker: And that was a really good use of tactical ah overlaid map, which is, I mean, the strategic map, it's a hexagon map, then you get into the fight. So basically,
Speaker: Total War looked at that or Creative Assembly looked at that and said this is how we're going to do it but in a grand escape and that's really important I think when they take into account yeah you can't shoot that panzer or that panther standing over there because you have a small really really small clump of trees that actually blocks your sight you can try to fight the rocket but it will probably hit a tree which got you to okay, this is my maybe not the optimal firing position. We have to do this.
Speaker: And on the other hand, got it. Oh, I have to take this point. I have to capture that point. The German machine gun is probably in that head throw. Should I charge across this open field?
Speaker: No, you should not. Because, I mean, Hitler's bus, so it's a thing. An MG42 will just move your guys down. you moved around, it it took a longer time and maybe you just captured one point instead of three, but you had your army intact for the next battle.
Speaker: So Close Combat, they did a really good job with the immersion and the level of graph, or not the level of graphic, it's not a graphically good game, but the level of detail for being such an old game.
Speaker: and So that's just one of the things I wanted to put up there just moving away from Total War. I think Total War does it brilliantly, but
Speaker: i can't really agree with either Rome or Napoleon, but that's a whole other episode who we'll get into later. Oh, yes, we will. um So I've been thinking about this, did what what you said, and there is something I can find very interesting, which is impassable terrain.
Speaker: Especially, i mean, on every map it's interesting, but especially when you model a battle map. So I do a lot of hiking. I like going out hiking in the woods and just in general. And one of my um most clear like experiences is that Sweden, and probably most other countries, are mostly made out of impassable terrain.
Speaker: If you're going to do so anything anywhere in Sweden, you can generally not walk in a straight line towards it. You have to walk around stuff, you have to climb over stuff, you have to do like major detours.
Speaker: and This is something I think most strategy games ignore. I think there is a problem when you code a game, especially older the games with pathfinding for units stuff like that. You don't want to make terrain impossible to pass through and you don't want to make it impossible to shoot through.
Speaker: But my general opinion is that I love it. I love impassable terrain. I love when, at least on this sort of generated battle maps, I love where there just things you need to walk around. You're not playing on the timescale where you can just level that mountain and then build a road over it. You're on the timescale when we need to be there in 10 minutes, run the fastest possible direction, and then just might not be a straight line.
Speaker: It adds so many layers of just like, thinking and planning the battle. the the battle We just need to figure out what is the best way to get my units to where I need them to be, provided I just can't just draw up a straight line.
Speaker: yeah i agree with you there, because then you get the strategical sense of it, but it also brings me into one of my biggest do-not-do-this game developers. Please, for the love of God, do not do this.
Speaker: Because you have impassable terrain. I love that. I think it's magnificent. But when you get impassable terrain that can't be traversed it traversed by flying units, I get mad.
Speaker: yeah I'm close to rage quitting at that point. I mean, we we had some examples like Star Wars Battlegrounds. yeah It's just a bad game. Don't play it.
Speaker: I mean, it sucks. It's horrendous. But you also have... I'm hyping it for people to get a sense of what you shouldn't play. Try it yourself. You will see me and Andreas are right in this.
Speaker: But I mean, if you like if you like episode one and you like Age of Empire, but not enough to actually play Age of Empire, then Wars Battlegrounds might be the game for you.
Speaker: Yeah. And this podcast might not be for you. and But just this thing of here's a mountain range. You can't pass it with infantry units or mechanized units. Fine, I get that.
Speaker: But when you have a site ah hypersonic yet who can't fly over impassable terrain, I get mad. I get really, really mad. Do you have any other examples of that?
Speaker: Sorry? Do you have any other examples of that apart from Battlegrounds? Well, I have it from ah Warhammer Armageddon, and where we have flying units. i'm I'm not going to go in and just explain what a Valkyrie is or what Xerox fighter is or what Thunderhawk is or anything like that. We saved that for the Great Games Workshop episode. Sounds like things with wings.
Speaker: It's things with wings, and it's especially things with wings that actually can fly in space, but it can't pass fucking mountain range. That drives me mad. Yeah, that that's too like lazy developers.
Speaker: yeah I have memories of this, but I can't play the games. But I used to have memories of this phenomenon, and it bothers me. I have the opposite thing, though. I like games where horses can't fight in woods.
Speaker: You can't run a proper cavalry charge. You can almost not fight from a horse in a pine forest. Like, you just can't. And I like games who won't allow you to really run your horses essentially into any kind of low-brush forest.
Speaker: Horses should break their legs in low-brush forest. They shouldn't be able to to spot like pits and stuff. They should just take damage from it somehow. I love that, but i that is not something I see in a lot of games.
Speaker: I also want to mention, speaking of forest, my least favorite, with which is in Age of Empires. civilians and units, like infantry, can't walk through woods.
Speaker: They are a better kind of wall. yeah yeah. It's so weird. But I mean, just to get back to the cavalry thing, and I think this could be a stunning standing thing in every episode. Johan has a pet peeve, especially with movies.
Speaker: And I'm going off track here. But if this was a strategy game and if this was real, this would not have happened. Do you remember the epic scene in Gladiator? He takes the cavalry, he runs around them, and then he falls the gods or the Germans in the back.
Speaker: And he rides through a pine forest in full-on cavalry charge. No, you don't do that because the horses would break their fucking legs. This is a dumb way of doing it. Please do not do this.
Speaker: So that was the short way of saying, yes, I agree with you, Andreas. When when woods aren't hindering cavalry units, it kind of gets me upset because you do not do a full-on armored heavy cavalry charge through pine forest or dense forest of any kind because for everyone who's hiked in their life, you can trip on roots, on small vegetables, not vegetables, but small. How often you trip over the small vegetables you want?
Speaker: ah Yeah. Over a carrot. Often. Actually, yesterday I slipped on an onion that my girlfriend had they it dropped from the counter. So yes, often. yeah yeah awesome But no, you do not charge cavalry that way. And especially you do not use cavalry in that way.
Speaker: Because cavalry is for harassing and running down the enemy. You don't use them in ah in a tight forest because they're not effective.
Speaker: I'm a little weird but worried about Magnus because he's been smiling at us. and and Yeah, I know. i know And he's probably as partner here going to teach us about horses. I'm going to disagree with you guys.
Speaker: Okay. No, I'm not going to fully disagree, but lets let's just not get to it. I want to quote the Duke of Wellington. on the eve of the Battle of Quatre Bruns, I think. where one of his generals said, ah oh, we have, no, general, we have we have the forest at our backs. This is a bad position to fight. And he said, I've scouted that forest. You could charge the nineund a nine pound of battery through it or something of that ilk.
Speaker: I mean, it depends on the woods. And this is what bothers me is when when you kind of treat all woods the same. you you can yeah You can tell that I'm i'm a from a farm in Sweden here. right Not all woods are the same.
Speaker: i mean i like games that work with for example i mean i mean light brush and thick forest and treat them differently and you're never going to get this perfectly right you are by the way you're perfectly right that cavalry charges and woods are a bad idea but honestly they managed to film that scene in gladiator without breaking the horse's legs so it's not it's not impossible to move cavalry units through all kinds of woods uh look at the american civil war for example uh it's a thing that has always been a problem in in real life that different sides have different opinions of what what you can do when you move troops through forested areas.
Speaker: ah Someone feels like, okay, this forest is impassable until the other side passes through the woods and surprise them. I like strategy games, especially modern strategy games where you can move through these woods.
Speaker: ah But I think you have to kind of differentiate when we have strategy games that are not trying to model reality. or that are fantasy for example or not trying to uh 100 life-like model reality i'm i'm perfectly fine with these weird things what i don't like is strategy games especially when we're talking about battle maps that kind of have the ambition or sell you or or selling the ambition to model reality especially when they're historical games that screw these things up uh and
Speaker: I had an example with Steelivision for the podcast where I like that for Steelivision 2, they added kind of light brush and light forest that armored units and wheeled units can move through, but they can't move through thick forest.
Speaker: But it's it is because they... they made a mistake with their earlier games where it was hard, where you couldn't move armor units or mechanized units through through woods. And that's just not the case. Sometimes you can't.
Speaker: ah So they had to add another layer because they are trying to simulate reality. If you're not going to do that, it's fine. And I'm fine with older games that don't do this. I got a bit of a, it you know,
Speaker: anxiety flashback to age of empires 2 where you build a wall around your camp where you're like yeah this wood is here it's even better than a wall then your civilians cut down that wall you realize you have ah quarter of your campus completely undefended yeah yeah yeah uh No, not go into the pet peeves of Gladiator or any other movies in that sense or how Romans used cavalry, which, no, they did not use equitance in that way. But no and ah and yeah other than that, yes, i agree with you.
Speaker: yeah My pet peeve comes when it's thick, dense forest. and they say this is a thick, dense forest, and you kind of get slowed down, but you can still make a cavalry chart, and cavalry is still effective, they break up a line, ah that then it's just lazy development, but but then again, i mean, i have no problem with charts of the Rohirrim, to say, yeah for example, the Hornburg, even though they actually climb a slope, and then they run down the other slope instead of coming in the back and just
Speaker: smashing them against the walls. That's bad tactical decision. But it's a cool scene. And sometimes in games we want that cool feeling of, look at my Cavalier just charging out because this works. and so So yeah, i both I agree with you in in the sense of in the sense of, yeah, it depends on on the woodlands they have. But when they treat all woods the same,
Speaker: that That's something that can kind of grind my gears in it because there's a difference between... If we go down to Belgium and look at the Ardenn forest, I mean, it's planted trees. You have straight lines for 100 yards where you can just walk and see to rail the other side.
Speaker: But if you look at Swedish forests up where I live in the middle of Sweden, ah In Sundsvall or down in Gryt, where you live, Magnus, or even further up in Luleå or Jokvall, you have old woods. They are not planted woods.
Speaker: That's a whole different setting than planted wood where all the trees are in a straight line and you have a certain spacing between them.
Speaker: I kind of want to get in on this discussion, but i should I shall not because we need to move on because there is a lot of map to cover. So just want to round out the sort of battle map with the worst one, which is probably Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings, where it's ah actually a dice map.
Speaker: You enter a mini sort of battle map thing, but it's just the dice rolls. They don't even model dice. um I just think it's funny that they they do sort of the same thing as the other games, but they just pop up up a small window and then you get numbers.
Speaker: Anyways, and I'm not going to give you ah time to address that because you guys always want to de defend the paradox. i't know I wasn't going to defend it. I was going to say they removed the dice that were in the earlier games. And I missed those dice but because that actually told me something.
Speaker: Yeah. um But we need to step take a step back to the, let's call it the overworld. So the general, like... Did they like the map you generally would if if it was real life, play out your strategies on like the games that just like Age of Empires, which we have mentioned and most RTS games where you essentially run around on an overworld and do stuff.
Speaker: Here we have a bunch of things that that that are interesting to talk about. bunch of pet peeves. Infrastructure, different terrains, how you model armies on the map.
Speaker: I don't even know where to start. Do you have any suggestion? yeah like What is a good and bad overworld?
Speaker: good A good overworld, I think, is, and I'm coming back to this, it's an old game, ah but Close Combat. they have a good overworld. And I also think a lot of the Total War games, they have a good overworld where we actually get to see what they have. But with that said, and we all play Hearts of Iron 4.
Speaker: And I mean, when we started playing it, it was basically a paradox map game, and so to speak. But I think I have this when we were playing with with our game group, Hygge Hoy.
Speaker: and And we're going to go more into detail about Hard Summer 4. When they did the, I think it the DLC, and not a step back, when they introduced Railroads.
Speaker: And I felt like, okay, am I playing a Strad game or am I playing Railroad Tycoon right now? and I love the Railroads. Yeah, I love the Railroads.
Speaker: But I do not love the fact that did before they kind of patched it in the yeah following DLCs, I was more like, yeah, okay, Railroad, I need this for level four. I need this here. but But then they kind of started, they they made a good patch with supply centers and railroads, and it became easier because in the beginning, when we had the first release of that DLC, we were just,
Speaker: Every railroad that is a level five, that's a good railroad. Every railroad that's level one, that's bad. So you have to upgrade your railroads. And they didn't really tell people, is it best to upgrade it to level five straight away or upgrade it to level two?
Speaker: wait and then upgrade it to level three, level four, so forth and so forth. yeah And I think I agree with you. think in most ways, Hot Spiron did railroads wrong yeah yeah in the sense that did I think the big difference should be, do you have a one or not?
Speaker: Not how good it is. Because sooner or later. A railroad is just a railroad. um And sure you can improve. Its in efficiency. But but way by their standards. It many doubles. What you can put through it. Just by uploading.
Speaker: What I love about it. And what I love about some games. Which actually have supply lines. And supply on the map. is the notion that and you can all of a sudden start to play a game about breaking supply lines.
Speaker: Like in Hearts of Iron now, compared to when the game was newer, actually para-dropping on a railway is a meaningful strategic action that makes a lot of sense say in the game, and that can hurt the enemy a lot.
Speaker: One of my favorite games of all time, War Kings Battles. it's ah It's not ah really a map game. It's very much a sort of real-time, more like Age of Empires style game.
Speaker: But it also has supply lines in the sense that your resources are moved by wagons between different city centers. And you can only use the resource once they reach a specific yeah location.
Speaker: So raiding the supply lines all of a sudden makes sense. And that is just something I love about, something you can do with maps so or with Overworld that love to make it more meaningful to play geography, play the supply lines, play against like positioning, not just to like try to sneak your armies around the the other player's army, like in Starcraft or try to get the high ground, but actually trying to trick them. If you are behind them or between them and their main city, it's going to be a problem for them.
Speaker: like I love that. It adds so much planning and so much thinking to the game just by adding supply lines. Yeah. Well, to answer your question, i mean what's what's a good kind of overall or main map mode?
Speaker: ah I do think there's something to be said for older strategy games, for X games, for, I mean, hex based games where so it's so clearly abstract, so you don't have to model everything.
Speaker: And generally, I think that makes for ah very pleasant game to play where we have some features. I mean, I can say, okay, i can I can go here. i can't go. i i can't walk over water.
Speaker: i can't walk over a tall mountain, but anywhere else I can go. And I think that's... that makes for a very playable game. And it kind of makes me sad that a lot of games I've moved away from that ah because it works ah as long as you're not really trying to model everything.
Speaker: If you're trying to model everything, i have a few more bad examples. I mean, of you can notice that I've just played Steel Division, but my god is that strategic map just so just bad because in a game where they've tried to be very faithful to kind of like history and actual geography when you get into the battle maps uh the strategic map is just it's it's it's pretty much just ignores logistics.
Speaker: and It's really weird how you can move your units. I mean, the surround mechanic is it's just terrible. And it lets you, it it kind of rewards you a gamer for just playing a game of surround instead of trying to play out the actual operations.
Speaker: ah So I think that maybe don't scrap that, but yeah. You have to move forward. And they've they've always been bad at this in their games.
Speaker: I think it's Eugene Systems that does this. Right, Yawal? yeah Yeah, I think this. Strategic maps. Fantastic on the tactical level, but terrible on the strategic. i want to get in and rant about rivers.
Speaker: Do you want me to wait with that? Or can I rant about rivers? Let's do rivers. we want to talk about bridges. Yes. Yes. Because how how, my God, how can we not have learned how to handle rivers and bridges in strategy games?
Speaker: It's just always such a bad, I thought about it to this day, and I actually got mad while working today, thinking about how rivers are modeled in strategy games. Because it's either like this impassable barrier,
Speaker: Or it's way too easy to move across. And a lot of games, ah looking at you again, Eugene Systems, how can you not blow bridges more often or set fire to them?
Speaker: I mean, the obvious thing when you're defending something is that, okay, this this river is... a This is something with on which I base my defense. I don't want a nice passable bridge here.
Speaker: I will mine it, I will blow it, or I will at least mine it. i will set fire to it if I have to. And there's just such a lot of games that don't take in account that if you're not using a bridge, you don't want it to be there.
Speaker: And On the reverse, it's often true when you look at, and as I said, I'm a bit of a military history buff. Rivers are more passable than you think. There are countless examples of a defending party that thinks, okay, we're behind an impassable river or a river that can only be passed in these specific places.
Speaker: And someone finds a place to wade over the river and flank them. Battle of Lund. Yeah. Battle of Lund, American Civil War again, Wellington in India, he did this.
Speaker: and There are thousands of examples, and it seems to be so hard for studios to model this in strategy games, so both in the overworld and in the tactical map.
Speaker: And I think that this is something that, yeah. ah Hearts of Iron does it. possibly I think where they they treat the river as something permeable, but that just gives you defensive bonuses.
Speaker: it's ah It's simplified, but at least it's smarter. But Hearts of Iron doesn't really have terrain. They have extra columns in the sort of hidden Excel document or a spreadsheet behind the game.
Speaker: that is what everything in Hards of Iron is. um Every buff, every terrain, every featured, weather, everything is just, okay, we add a new number to a new column, then and we multiply it up. And it's sort of neat, and it's sort of cool, but it's... You know that all games are make-believe, right?
Speaker: Yes, but most of them aren't just ah me doing the things I do at work, but with a small graphic interface. um But wanted to add something to Rivers, two things about Rivers. First of all, yes, forwarding is a thing.
Speaker: Like, As long as the enemy is not standing directly opposite to you, you can have a few guys swimming across. Some of them might die with a rope. And once you have a rope across, you can sort of start to walk, more or less drag people and stuff along it. And then and you can build the bridges. There are just things you can do.
Speaker: I really like it when rivers slow things down or when it's sort of in a very tight battle on a battle map. They might be an impossible terrain because you don't have the time to pass.
Speaker: But they should be affordable. Second thing, bridges. um I have played a lot of Bannerlord recently, and I always play a lot of Total War. And these games, they want to model the battlefield real time.
Speaker: And they want to model like individual units. And they want to make a bridge, a permanent structure that you walk across. And this has a really annoying effect, which is that you essentially create a choke point.
Speaker: And you can always play the tactics. Just push all your infantry at the end of the bridge and your archers on the sides and just pepper them. And sure, that's a real tactic in the most games. it And it is a real tactic in reality.
Speaker: it This happened. Battles on bridges were a bad idea. But when they force you to do it, it just gives you an instant win point. like If you get the bridge, you win the fight unless you're massively outnumbered.
Speaker: And it is so annoying. yeah Yeah, I agree with you here. and I mean, Battle of Stirling Bridge, for example, to take up.
Speaker: And now I'm air quoting, real life event and where one man holds a bridge. But the things that bugs me about rivers in maps are that either they all look like Lule Elf, Torne Elf, Kalix Elf.
Speaker: and Maybe take an example that isn't a small river in the north of Sweden. Yeah, but I'm going to tell they look like yeah the Donjo when you have a flood.
Speaker: Basically, you probably... At least a football field across. Yeah, at least a football field across. Or, as Total War tends to do it, they did this in Total War Shogun, they did this in Rome, they did this in Medieval.
Speaker: It's a small ditch with water in it. and you can't pass it because you need to use the bridge. which Which is kind of this, have you seen a river? Have you ever actually gone out and seen what a river is?
Speaker: it it It is not conformatively, it's 30 centimeters deep or it it's three meters deep and it's streamy and you have waterfalls in it.
Speaker: No, that's not how a river works. If you can't cross at this point or there's a bridge here, but the other army is on the other side, you find another place to cross. They are not impassable terrain.
Speaker: And I have yet to come across a game that actually does this consistently good to represent rivers.
Speaker: Yeah, I was so excited when Civ 7 introduced the fact that you could sail up rivers. yeah Because that is sort of a slightly kind of maybe a little little bit important part of human history.
Speaker: um Maybe we did it a few times. um Maybe it was sort of kind of foundational for human society even. So it it was sort of a thing. yeah um but we need to move away from reverse. There are at least two things in the overworld we need to talk about.
Speaker: ah One of them is height. Like elevation. to what Because that is something that like almost all strategy games that has elevation modeled at all will support. puts stats bonuses or some kind of effect on it. We need to talk about it.
Speaker: We need to talk about troop movements on the map. And I think we also need to talk about a little bit about what should be and should not be on a map before it gets too messy.
Speaker: And I do not have a preferred order. So if any one of you want to jump in on any of those topics, go ahead. I have the high ground. I mean, it's established. I have the high ground.
Speaker: and it not only in Star Wars, actually quite a good Star Wars movie, I've kind of re-evaluated
Speaker: the mid-tier Star Wars movies. ah real way to them But I mean, if you're standing on high ground, you have a better field of view, you have a better field of fire, yeah people have to charge up to you and you they have to break you.
Speaker: I mean, we have countless examples of people having the high ground winning, then we have most famously one example of of people having the high ground and still losing, and that's the Battle battle of Hastings 1066.
Speaker: But I mean, having the high ground, it's a tactical advantage. That's why we tend to see, both in real life and in strategy games, where you try to seek out having the high ground, digging in on the high ground.
Speaker: So... Yeah, I mean, high and ah high ground, not in 9 out of 10, but I mean in 900 out of 1,000, having the high ground is a good thing.
Speaker: Why do you build caustals on the high ground? Because high ground rules.
Speaker: Well, I think that a lot of kind of like the overworld maps in strategy games do this well. They give you some kind of bonus, some kind of definable factor. And and I mean, it's...
Speaker: it's kind of roughly translate translated often. I mean, you get a, you get a set bonus for fighting in hills. You get a set bonus for fighting in air for defending in mountains. Uh, you get a set bonus for having the high ground and I'm fine with that.
Speaker: I mean, we can always talk about, okay, how much of a factor is it? Uh, and I don't think it, you, you get into a kind of a problem if you, if you reward it too much, uh, because as we when we look at history, it's, it's not impossible to win a battle where you moved out the high ground. It's not impossible to win a battle if you, if you,
Speaker: ah leave the high ground. It can be a valid part of a strategy. a Napoleon Prats and Heights, ah for example. ah But I do think that tactical maps often fail to represent this.
Speaker: There isn't a tangible ah tangible bonus or tangible ah difference in holding the high ground. ah And usually, especially when it comes to modern games, because, like yeah, you can shoot longer if you're standing on the high ground. Well, I can shoot you as well.
Speaker: ah yeah And it's often a bit too easy to storm an elevated position, I feel. yeah i know, just a viewpoint. not really i can't back this up, but I get the feeling that they represent this better in overworld maps and strategical maps than in tactical maps and battle maps.
Speaker: What do you think of Yes. I think a lot of things. um One thing is that I'm a little bit sad sometimes that it's always almost always, in almost all of the strategy games that play, a bad tactic to hide in a ditch or a hole.
Speaker: Like if you want to hide in a small valley to not be discovered and then just rush up and fight someone, you're almost always fighting with like a lot of minuses on your side. and and it It makes me a little bit sad ah because they generally they generally do somehow model height advantage or elevation advantage, but not the advantage of the surprise.
Speaker: I'm a little bit sad about that, but... I also have two two very interesting cases that im that I think represent when it's done well and when it's done poorly. ah So my one of my favorite games ever, War of Kings Battles, has a lot of elevation and it plays a lot around with it.
Speaker: But it also makes one mistake. I think it's coded somehow in the game so that elevation gives you bonus. More elevation gives you more of that bonus. Standing on a very, very tall and very steep mountain makes your arrows very, very, very strong.
Speaker: Like, for some reason, an arrow can all of a sudden like pierce an elephant, uh... Because they used I think they just coded something wrong. And I've seen versions of this in other games as well that so um one of my other favorite games, Cossacks, I think have a little little bit about it.
Speaker: Like your bullet gets stronger the higher up you are. And i think the better way to do it is actually accuracy. Like your chances of hitting while firing downrange is better than firing uphill.
Speaker: or downhill and uphill. I think that's a better way to represent it, that it's easier to actually pick a target and hit a target when it's below you. But your bullet doesn't actually just gain 20% extra damage from being fired downhill.
Speaker: I do prefer that because it makes it harder for it to just weirdly stack elevation bonuses unintentionally. But in general, I like elevation. It's one of those things that adds a lot of dynamism to a battlefield makes certain points important to actually take and hold because they are more defensible. It's the same thing as with the impassable terrain.
Speaker: want parts of the battlefield to be interesting to take and then do something with. I want people to be forced to take them back at a high cost.
Speaker: Yeah, but the thing about elevation hills ah having the high ground is it it kind of borders something that I want to discuss in another podcast because it's not strictly geography or maps, but there's, I mean, a lot of games have problems with rendering, or there including battlefield fortifications.
Speaker: And to quote, if you start in roll, can I like, where's the ditch dig a ditch? Yeah. Which is something it you you should be able to do that in a lot more strategy games. It should have an effect ah and it should be rendered that. Okay, if some if one side is dug in, you have such an advantage.
Speaker: ah Think about Pikeman. In every game where I've seen Pikeman represent it, I mean, it's so hard to kind of show how they are affected by elevations. And one and one of the reasons why, i mean, Swiss pikemen stopping the thing is it's gunpowder.
Speaker: The cannons got effective. And the other thing that made them lose their first battles is that the enemy got better at field flortications. And when they knew they were facing the switch the Swiss, they dug a ditch or they positioned themselves by a sunken road.
Speaker: And all of a sudden the push of Pyke is negated. and Those things are hard to show in strategy games, I know that. But field fortifications and elevation should be much more a thing, especially in strategy games that try to model reality.
Speaker: It kind of sounds like all of us has to play Ultimate General Civil War just to really get this thing where you can dig down, you can hold the high ground, you can ah build fortifications. I mean, brilliant game.
Speaker: a Brilliant game. But I have something... fortifications live in Ultimate General Civil War? Oh yeah, you can dig in. You can dig in. Because if you have them standing long enough, they build their own fortifications.
Speaker: oh Ah. I do not remember that. ah Total War ah Empire has so version of this that if you stay over two turns at the same tile at the tactics phase of the before the battle starts... Let me just stop you. um I know that games render this. I've played both these games.
Speaker: I'm just saying, do they do it that well? ah No, but they can't do it that well. and totally i think there is I think there is something to this, though. If you did this in the real sense if you did it realistically...
Speaker: you would never have any battles. Like, no one is going to actually attack this. This is sort of more difficult, actually. It's going to be touching on the next thing I want to talk about, how you model armies on the map.
Speaker: So in a game where you have a sort of a model for your army, like a miniature soldier for the entire army, or a miniature general, and it contains an army, it's too easy to walk around him.
Speaker: If he has a massive bonus from being dug in, the other player is just going to walk their um their miniature somewhere else. Fuck up his fortresses and cities and stuff like that. Because no one is going to take that fight.
Speaker: It's different when you have like real battle lines and a lot of troops on a like more fully modeled map where you can't walk around them because they actually take width. they they They fill up space or like in every dimension.
Speaker: but But I think there is something here that like the game makers have to sort of cut out a lot of these sort of being dug in, those kinds of effects, just to ensure that battles actually happen and that you can't abuse it against the AI too much.
Speaker: Yep, but then again, sometimes you want to be be Luigi Cadrona. Sometimes you just want to charge hundreds of thousands of men up a mountain slope and see what happens. I can probably break them on the 8th or tenth or eleventh battle of Isonzo, this will work. I mean, I just throw more men at them.
Speaker: But no, did to be all serious, yes, I agree with you here because, I mean, a human player would say they are dug in. Can I move move around them? Yes, ah and yeah absolutely.
Speaker: And abusing the AI, it's a thing, but it kind of makes the game easier. the game easier here But But that said, sometimes you just want to go for guts and glory and be Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, which is a totally pointless charge, or Luidi Cadrona, or you want to be an Austro-Hungarian field marshal saying that, yeah, Carpathians, yeah, sure, we charge that. i mean, it has happened in history.
Speaker: Of course it has. I mean, the Swiss pikemen charged and it worked. didn't work anymore. ah they They charged at the Battle of Pavia. They lost, but they still did charge. Battles did happen. And I'm not, I mean, if if you're say if you're trying to render history or reality, I mean, yeah, sometimes to be it's also the case that sometimes these effects happen.
Speaker: I mean, you get a bonus in one way and you get a debuff in others. it's not really It's not geography, I'm sorry. It's not field fortifications. But take the example of forming pi ah forming square and Napoleon and Empire Total War.
Speaker: and It's really good versus cavalry. It sucks if you're getting attacked by artillery. And that's a counter move. There are counter moves to ah taking certain defensive positions.
Speaker: and And I think that's... a good rendering of history and a good rendering of reality is that there are there are times and places where you do form square, there are times and places where you don't.
Speaker: yeah yeah i Yeah, I totally agree with you here. But something I can feel, just to kind of move it along, it's when I have ah this kind of attack battle, a lot is going on. yeah but My cavalry is bogged down somewhere, my shooting line is is crumbling, my left flank is winning, but my right flank is falling in.
Speaker: I mean, minimaps.
Speaker: but How do you feel about those? Because sometimes we have really good minimaps and sometimes we have minimaps in my point point of view, that kind of shows too much of the action of separate units, but they don't show me any terrain, they don't show me anything else and it kind of just goes into a mishmash of, yeah, something is happening down here in the right hand side corner. I do not have time to look at that.
Speaker: I mean, i'm a bad I'm a bad gamer, but the minimap is 97% of the time is something I ignore. ah You know, I glance at it sometimes. i um I get why it's a useful feature. And I like the games to where you can kind of like click the minimap in and out.
Speaker: ah Because it means that I can get rid of it when I want to and bring it up when I need to. And I agree with you that it's a problem when you get too much from the minimap. I think the case. In most cases, you should not be fully aware what's happening most and most cases you should be kind of you should not be fully aware of what's happening around you or what's happening on every part of the map, whether it's a tactical map or ah whether it's a tactical map or whether it's a strategic overworld map.
Speaker: um
Speaker: Yeah. I have different views on the minimap in different strategy games, and I think there is a sort of division between two styles of games. So if you play any kind of game that actually wants you to bring you into the sort of battle map or wants you to play out a specific battle...
Speaker: I think there is sort of... I think it's so much almost charming to not even have a minimap. um You get to see the battlefield when you position your units at the start, and then you don't get to see it anymore. I'm thinking of like almost the Bandlord style of of combat, where you essentially are a guy on a horse, and you can see what the guy on the horse can see. And if you're an infantryist, you can see less, because a horse gives you almost y at one and a half meter of height.
Speaker: I love that. That is great, and it's cool. And in that style of minimap games, I guess we have sort of my pet bin, which is that the Total War is doing it wrong. Because they they they are sort of trying to model a battle and they're giving you a minimap.
Speaker: I guess they can do that. I guess you're playing as sort of the officer or the staff and you have maps and stuff as you're planning to. but they make the map so incredibly useless. yeah like you don't give you good there is something I don't know why they always want to make it pixely.
Speaker: and They just want to paint up your units as sort of lines in ah color. It's realistic in some ways, but for heaven's sake, just give me like chess pieces or something even more stylized so that I actually know what I have wear.
Speaker: The fact that I have color over there and color over there doesn't help me. And it just makes me not want to look at it. The fact that it's round, the fact that you don't have proper compass direction is in most of the games, it makes it hard to find stuff.
Speaker: And I'm going to let you dive in on this one, but i just want to talk about a little bit about the other style of game where I think minimaps have an entirely different role. And this is the kind of play games where you actually model in the overworld the entire, like, everything.
Speaker: um ah for example Age of Empire is a good example just because everyone has played it cos Cossacks is a good game that is an example of this which everyone hasn't played but like when you have like a city here and a city here and an army here and army here and army over here ah like spread across the map I'm waving my hands around for everyone who's listening um but like they're not on the same battlefield and you need to run all of these things simultaneously and you're almost sort of playing it like a god game from above You need the minimap just to quickly jump between all the fields of battle, all the scenes of battle.
Speaker: You need to be able to quickly jump to your town, build a few villagers, jump up to the army one, do a few things, jump over to army two, do a few things. And you need to be able to like have some kind of overview.
Speaker: And here minimaps becomes incredibly important. You can't really play without them. And I can see that you want in on this. Yeah, but... ah I kind of tend to agree with you mostly, but I mean, we also have, pet peeve I have is, have you played the game Gates of Hell?
Speaker: ah that was long ago. Yeah. Do you remember the minimap in that? It's quite a good minimap. It kind of shows the zones you're holding and kind of show, because you have to cap certain positions to get points and win.
Speaker: ah but they have the thing that kind of annoys the hell out of me. They have the thing where they show that this unit is now firing.
Speaker: Yes, I'm waving my hands around. You will not see this, but unit A is firing on unit B, and you you get tracer rounds. You get to see the tracer rounds. The same is for artillery, which makes it very, very easy for you. Even though I don't see it,
Speaker: I can counter artillery barrage this point because I see the line where it's shot from, even though I don't see the unit, I can fire back. Steel Division does this better where you kind of get a smoke trail um in it but because you have the minimap, you can look at that.
Speaker: But here I see the trace fire where it goes from and I can just, oh, it probably came from Let me just look at minimap until he fires again. Oh, he fired again. He's here. Fire everything on this position. And I think that's a bad minimap to have. where i can act and the same thing goes for if I'm ambushed.
Speaker: If I walk in and I don't see where they are, but I see the tracer fires, I know where they are. I can just level buildings or I won't go in that way anymore. And that is not something I think I should know from um from a minimap in a strategy game.
Speaker: know to get i I don't want to get into this on the episode. I just want to say that everyone here is a hardcore RTS gamer. It's like, ah yeah, the Minimap is kind of like, it's absolutely critical.
Speaker: I never played StarCraft, but I think that's a good example of like, yeah, Minimap is half the game. It's what I'm looking at right now, but to get good at the game, it's just... half your brain needs to be kind of in the minimap mode, check what's happening ah kind of more, not in the smallest grid tactical level, but more kind of operationally on the battle on the battlefield.
Speaker: ah I want to talk about something completely different. I know we need to wrap up soon, but ah since we're talking about geography, another thing that bugs me is kind of like, what's a rich part of the map?
Speaker: And this goes for the Civilization games, for Europa Universalis, U4. And a lot of games were like, okay, this is a plains tile. So if you build your city or your base here, it will be rich. This is a mountain tile. You will not be rich, but you can build mines.
Speaker: And I think that's just a poor rendering of what... Okay, I don't think that most of the time terrain is not the critical... is not that critical. It's what you do with the terrain.
Speaker: And I think that games are getting better ah at this. ah And also kind of like the effects of war, the effects of raiding. ah But that bugs me when when it's it like, okay, so this is just so strategic. It will automatically be successful.
Speaker: Especially when you're and playing game that kind of develops, where you have to develop over time. um And i I do think that it should be more up to, okay, so have I actually have i actually managed to build my trading network so that my trading hub is successful rather than, yes, this is on a coastal tile next to a river. Therefore, trading will happen.
Speaker: Not necessarily. ah Look at Greek city-states in south of Italy. Most of them do' don't have a decent port nowadays. I think there's one, and that's Tarantum.
Speaker: ah I can't remember what called nowadays because the modern times is for losers. History is all that matters.
Speaker: Exactly. oh my god, you just brought me, you got me thinking of something. I don't know if want to toss it in, but one thing I loved about bunch of old Total War games was how they just showed the resources as sort of all icons on the map. So you could figure out, okay, so this town is going to have access to wheat, it's going to have access to gold, stuff like that.
Speaker: like This is an entire and area of itself, and I think we're going to push it to a later episode when we talk about resources in games. But I must say, I do love the feature of having a slightly more styly stylized map where you can show terrain features and resource features at the same time.
Speaker: It makes it way easier for me as a sort of planning geek to figure out what i want to do but but that that gi capacity That gets back to my pet peeve. you have to You have to pick a lane.
Speaker: Do you want a kind of like model reality, which is complex and messy and so much about what ah kind of like the historical coincidences and what choices you actually make?
Speaker: Or do you want a fun stylized game? Well, I must add, you can get the worst of both words you you can get the worst of both worlds here. You can get the games like yeah Total War Throne of Britannia, where they want to have a stylized map, but they want to model the trees so realistically that they are messing in the way.
Speaker: Yeah. ah And on that bombshell, I think we're going to wrap up this game. Yeah, I think it's a wrap. I think it's a wrap. and And I mean, yeah i think we have a lot more to talk about in maps and we'll probably come back to maps. But I hope you got an inkling to to what we feel is important in map games. And I have nothing else to add ah because then we'll be here for another two hours.
Speaker: And no one wants that. I have so many things to add, but I'm going to show some level of discipline and just let us end here. So thank you, jo everyone and Magnus, for a great episode. And i ah hope I want to thank you all listeners, of course, as well. And I hope you stick around for our next episode, which is going to arrive sometime, probably shortly.
Speaker: ah But anyways, have a nice day, morning, evening, visit on the toilet, wherever you're listening to us. And we will try to have a nice future evening today. Bye-bye. Take care.
Speaker: you
