Never On Sunday

The same day I got to try out Dominion, I got a chance after a long, long hiatus to play 1830 once again. 1830 became quite popular for a while in my circle back at U of I, and I miss it. The game is complex—not quite SPI wargame standard, but a step above the typical German family game and a half-step above even the more complicated of those—and all the information has to come up front, since there’s no luck and victory or ruin typically hinges on navigating a series of delicately timed decisions. With a learning curve more appropriately called a learning cliff and a play time around three or four hours even after you know what you’re doing, it’s hard to talk any but hardened veteran gamers into giving it a whirl. But the results are worth it.

Or so I remembered. This opportunity to give it another whirl wasn’t nearly so satisfying as it had been in college, and I’m not entirely sure why.

The pace has a lot to do with it. 1830 involves a lot of finicky fencing punctuated by dramatic seismic shifts, and this run at least was dominated by small play. Although we very nearly saw a bankruptcy and/or the effective ruination of three players at a stroke when diesels appeared which would have made the most dramatic conclusion I’d ever seen, Nik opted to buy up to a diesel rather than take the last remaining 6 train and left the door open for everyone to survive with minor costs. Thus there was only one notable but hardly seismic turn of fortune. As a result, the last turn where little happens but players slogging to drain the bank and end the game seemed more painful than usual.

Nevertheless, this session wasn’t all that different from what I remember from college. The two new players were enough on the ball to grasp what they should be doing before getting into hopeless difficulty, which is a minor accomplishment in itself and compares with some of my college buddies’ experienced play. The grinding last turn had always been a problem, and a new set of players meant a break from stereotyped play. (1830 has a peculiar quality of rewarding a certain amount of mimicry. This leads to a small, predictable set of openings which set, oddly, is different for different local groups, and players are often shocked to encounter a new set of stereotyped openings.) For that matter, all the features I remember were still there.

I suspect instead that the session wasn’t as fun as I recall because we’ve been spoiled in the meantime by the German revolution. In the early ’90s, games for the German market offered quality and, because they were a family institution, had to be accessible as well as offering strategic depth. Turns out you can have both, at least up to a fairly tolerable compromise point, and once the German games penetrated other (i.e., US) markets, creators around the world started imitating the philosophy while exploring elements of their own design, and games just got better overall. Settlers of Catan has all the good parts of Monopoly without the arguments and without the game-killing option of obstructing everything. Small World is like Risk with more variety and less vulnerability to runs of bad luck.

I haven’t seen anything yet to replace 1830 in the same way, with all the play and half the hassle, but it will come. (No, Ticket to Ride is not the same. Trains alone do not make a substitute.) When it does, I’m getting a copy.

Hm. Already I need to rethink my intended policy of tackling Civ5 at high difficulty levels.

At least I can rest confident that it isn’t simple cowardice or bad sportsmanship. Turns out I can win at emperor, and I’m pretty confident I can win beyond that with some practice. But at what cost?

My last two games pit me as China against Germany, and Greece against France, and I thought I was getting creamed both times. Had I not shifted mental gears, I would indeed have been creamed. My opponents, despite holding perhaps half the territory I did (and thus half the reserves of strategic resources), and perhaps 70% the population (and thus productive capacity), both handily out-wondered me and remained quite competitive in science. Grinding an economy was sending me to the loser bin. Hoping for some kind of insight as to how Germany was keeping up, I started scouting the world only to discover Bismark only had two cities.* This made me even more curious how it he could keep ahead in the wonder race, when I had several cities producing wonders in parallel—admittedly, not the most efficient strategy.

More confused than ever, I signed an open borders pact and started scouting Germany by land. I learned nothing from his terraforming, but discovered something even more valuable: Bismark had a horde of landesknechts and little else for military power—bad news for the horsemen donated me by a city-state, but good targets for the chu-ko-nu (superior Chinese crossbowmen) I had just learned to build. I popped out four of these and swept the continent. Four. I expected to need more, but figured I had best get started quickly before the Germans upgraded, and heavy reinforcements proved unnecessary. An almost identical victory over France followed, only it started earlier, since I knew what to look for.

So I can easily conquer enemies with numerical and technological superiority, yet can’t compete in the peace race. Moving up the scale from emperor difficulty will just accentuate the problem: you can whip the computer at deity, but only one way. Replayability withers in that scenario. You can struggle as long and hard as you like for other victory conditions, but whenever it looks like things will go bad, there’s always the nuclear option—figuratively if not literally. Worse, the victory won thereby is every bit as much a form of handicapping as playing at middling difficulty levels in order to enable peaceful, building play. Either approach robs triumph of its savor.

* On a side note, I call shenanigans on settling. The landform, which was supposed to be small continents but was in reality a single stringy one, was neatly divided in equal halves of natural spheres of influence. Bismark settled only half of his until my caravel found a wealth of unused territory. As if by magic, without anyone nearby to witness my scouting, Germany abruptly decided to settle this area. Napoleon did the same on a pangaea continent the next game, and I’ve seen the same behavior three times already. A bad omen for hopes that Civ5 wouldn’t be so cheat-dependent as its predecessors.

I realized something vaguely disturbing tonight: I’m not playing Civ properly any more.

Let me clarify. Ultimately, “playing properly” is a subjective standard: if you’re having fun, you’re “doing it right.” And I’m having fun. But I no longer (A) push myself to operate at higher and higher difficulties, ultimately demonstrating my superiority over the machine at the top setting, nor (B) find and exploit the game’s peculiarities necessary to do so. Now, exploiting rule loopholes and foolish AI to crack the system and ensure victory is not in itself a worthy play style—indeed, one might argue it a wholly unworthy play style—but the process of finding those loopholes and AI blind spots in the first place is a respectable pastime, and extremely good mental exercise. In the days of the original Civ, and later Civ2, I had the energy to work out for myself what the computer opponent was designed to do, and the proof of that insight was regularly whipping the game at deity level. Every so often I would stumble across someone’s advice only to discover I’d already figured it out, or even found something superior. Now a robust internet allows anyone simply to look up discoveries in an online forum and get someone else’s cracks mere days after the game hits the shelves. Without the exercise of finding the exploits in the first place, simply reading about and employing them becomes a form of cheating.

Not that I employ them, anyway. I read about others’ Civ experiences, note the exploits discovered, and silently applaud the effort and insight employed to find them, perhaps smile at the sometimes ridiculous implications, then return to my own games and play in my own style, ignoring the exploits entirely. Quite apart from a sense that that would be cheating, using such exploits means giving up a sense of “building an empire to stand the test of time,” the game’s explicit purpose and informal motto, and simply swarming the map with cheap units and cheap shots.

I enjoy building empires. I keep returning to Civ because I like building efficient systems more than blowing up bad guys. (That, and nobody else makes 4x games any more.) I also enjoy building sustainable and profitable cities, supply chains, corporations, and criminal gangs. It’s nice to have some kind of military component or other dramatic fail condition; otherwise mere patience becomes a substitute for intelligent play. But all other design elements being equal, I enjoy most those games that enable builder strategies.

Civ does, and that’s swell. But, once you give up on trying to crack the game, you’re on a subtle and slippery slope. Without exploits, there’s no hope of whipping the most advanced skill levels. (Not any more. Civ1’s promise that emperor difficulty was only for players feeling a need to be humbled was laughably untrue, but the AI has been built much smarter since then.) If you’re not going to be able to whip the most advanced skill levels without exploits no matter how cleverly you play, you’re justified in setting the difficulty to something more modest. If you don’t feel like micromanagement of every damn worker in every damn city every damn turn, you’re justified in setting the difficulty to something more modest still. But once you start making concessions like these to the slider bar that sets initial difficulty, where do you stop? When do you cross the line between setting difficulty to reflect the inherent challenge of the game and setting the difficulty to enable you to win with your favorite play style, free of the need to figure out how to play well?

For me, the slider stops at whatever setting is nominally the fair game—that is, employs no asymmetric advantages like a 20% reduction in building costs for computer players, or a 10% research bonus for the human. But is that really fair? Civ4 and Civ5 have superior AI to earlier titles in the series, but it still isn’t all that bright. If resources are even, then beating a random number generator shouldn’t be that great a challenge. If I can’t win a level or two above that, well… maybe I need to consider looking a little more closely towards my survival in a hostile world, and indulging a little less in projects to make my people happy, just as real world leaders must. Refusing to exploit the game’s loopholes becomes an excuse for refusing to step up to a proper challenge.

That’s not entirely wrong. I play Civ for fun. Building a shining, orderly empire is fun. Building a conquering army, terrorizing my neighbors, and generally behaving like an international jackass is not fun. (Not for me. If you like hacking your empire from the corpses of your enemies, go for it.) Adopting a game setting that makes the building of a shining orderly empire impossible is not fun. But a challenge is fun, too. Building a shining orderly empire despite Montezuma’s threats, and maybe even tearing away some of his territory for his affront, makes victory all the sweeter. And somewhere along the line, I stopped forcing myself to fight for victory simply to enjoy the more meditative pleasures of pure management. Maybe it’s time for a return to cracking the system.