Cities Skylines

[PZ]

I've long enjoyed the city building sims like Simcity and Cities Skylines.

I was browsing the YouTube channels looking for videos describing how to get started again (I left the game a long time ago). Because I really like Route 66 and all the things one might find along the old highway, I was intrigued by a playlist describing how to create a Route 66 town full of run-down and abandoned buildings from gas stations to motels. Some newer buildings are also present.

If you like the idea of the old road trips along Route 66, you might enjoy looking at the finished town pieces highlighted a couple of minutes before the end of the video.

I put these videos into my blog because for some reason the YouTube embedder strips all advertising from the videos for a much cleaner presentation. There is also a link to the original poster - he has quite a few instructional videos for sim gamers.

https://central.openworldgames.org/blog/2022/11/18/cities-skylines-berryville/

[fragger]

Interesting, cheers I never played that one. I did get into SimCity 3000 years ago, which I enjoyed, but I would reach a point where I would abruptly get sick of it, just like that. Then about six months later, I'd pick it up again, get into it again, then abruptly get sick of it again. I did that three or four times. A few years ago I picked it up for a couple of bucks on GOG.com just for old times' sake but it didn't translate well to a wide screen and was all stretched out, which looked crummy and I didn't like it, so I lost interest.

I always said that if I ever found myself in the US for a long enough time, I'd like to take a trip along Route 66. There's a lot of history along that road.

[PZ]

I'm the same with the sim games - start them and have fun for a while, but then a new shooter comes in and all my city building fun is instantly converted to shooter fun. 

[Dweller_Benthos]

The ones that grab me most are where you can build a city then drop an asteroid on it or let Godzilla attack and see what happens, that looked pretty funny.

[PZ]

I've never tried one of those, but it might be fun to see what happens. I'm kind of excited about the Route 66 creation because it reminds me of the strategy games you could get back in the 1970s. I purchased a Civil War game and of course since there were no computers, the game consisted of a foldable map of the entire war and hundreds of playing pieces. The map was so big it hardly fit on the table.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Friend of mine used to play a lot of those table top strategy games, had boxes and boxes of figures for keeping track of where things were, usually had to go to a place that hosted those types of things, as no one in the group had an empty room with tables big enough to hold everything.

[PZ]

When I was younger I had dreams of having a room big enough for a table, and imagined placing the game map under glass on the table top.

[fragger]

I've still got one of those games, "Panzer Leader". Unfortunately, half the pieces have gotten lost in translation over the years, but I've had the game since I was in my teens back in the 70s and sentimental value keeps me from chucking it out A friend and I used to get into that one, and some other titles. He had a couple of them himself, another WW2 one (can't remember what it was called but it was a European theater one) and a cool one based on Heinlein's Starship Troopers (the novel, that is - the movie was still years in the future). A current friend still has one based on Dune. A bunch of us have had a few games of that over the years, though we end up spending more time arguing over the rules than we do playing

There used to be entire stores dedicated to those games. There was one in Sydney back in the day which had literally hundreds of titles. Pick a conflict from any period in history and there was a game for it. There were other, non-military ones too, like Stock Market, Outdoor Survival and Civilization (yep, the one which Sid Meier would base his video games upon many years later).

The grand-daddy of them all was "The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-1943". Featuring a map almost 10 feet long and 3 feet wide (in five sections), about 1,600 playing pieces and a bewildering array of charts and tables, it's considered to be the most complicated tabletop board game ever created. A single game can easily last for more than six weeks if played 4-6 hours per day, and can have up to ten players (five on each side: Commander-in-Chief, Logistics Commander, Rear Area Commander, Air Commander and Front-Line Commander, each with their own duties and areas of responsibility). The depth of strategic detail is so nuts that if you're playing on the Axis side, you have to ensure that additional water is transported to the Italian troops so that they will have enough to cook their pasta (I'm not making that up). The game was featured in an episode of the sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" and references made to the gameplay in that episode sound so over-the-top that some viewers thought the game had to have been a made-up thing for the show. It wasn't, those references are all accurate.

[PZ]

Man, that is over the top old school gaming!

I'd not heard of that one before, but it sounds interesting, especially for a time period before video games and the Internet.

[fragger]

Yeah, it was a pretty full-on affair alright, PZ I never played it, but I remember seeing a print ad for it. Some of those old games used to come with a sheet of paper inside with ads for other titles on it, and I saw it on one of those. You can see pics of the map and game contents online as well, it's nuts

Okay, I'm gonna post a longie here, hope you don't mind if I wax lyrical for a bit

On the subject of oldie-worldie "hex-based" tabletop games, I recently acquired a set of wonderful turn-based American Civil War strategy games for PC called the "Battleground Series". Way back in the very early 90s, a company called Talonsoft made a series of PC games for Windows 3.1 (yep, the dinosaur itself) which were loving re-imaginings of the aforementioned hex-based tabletop board games of yore. They made about a dozen or so titles - five American Civil War ones, I think four Napoleonic War ones and three WW2 ones. The games were made in such a way that if you learned how to play one historical set, you could fairly easily pick up the others.

I originally bought their Civil War series back in the day (my interest in the subject having been piqued by Ken Burns' TV documentary series, which would spark a fascination with the event which persists to this day) and enjoyed them immensely. The depth of strategy and attention to historical detail in them was something else. The devs went to enormous lengths to recreate the topology of the battlefields and put thousands of hours of research into which units (regiments, brigades, divisions and corps) were present, where they were located at the time and how many men were involved. Even the historical commanding officers at the brigade, division, corps and army levels exist as units in the games (and they can be captured or killed), and all forces under their command, the smallest indivisible units of which being regiments, are faithfully represented and named (e.g. 20th Maine Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 1st Division, V Crops, Army of the Potomac).

The strategy is deep. Not only do you have to plan your moves carefully (you only get a single level of "Undo Move"), but you have to maintain the organizational integrity of your army, be mindful of individual unit morale and battle fatigue levels, manage ammo resupply, receive and direct reinforcements, consider logistics of unit movements, monitor command viability of leaders (they each have their individual "Command" and "Leadership" stats, which are in your best interests to maximize), maintain your lines, watch your flanks (it was all about flanks), manage your artillery, make proper use of your cavalry, and above all else, try to gain and hold the high ground... The high ground is key, due to the visibility it affords. It's the 1860s, there is no satellite or airborne tactical tech to tell you where the enemy is. You have to be able to SEE them - and you, as the player, can't see them unless your own units have a line of sight on them, and their line of sight is affected by the terrain. This makes for an aspect of battle which is impossible to reproduce on a tabletop board game - the element of surprise, i.e. not being able to see enemy units unless your own units can see them, and vice-versa. The old "fog of war".

Here's an example of the strategy depth: A cavalry regiment has to dismount in order to fight, unless they're engaging another mounted cavalry unit. When they dismount, their fighting strength, i.e. number of troops, drops by one quarter. This is because out of every four cavalrymen, one has to stay behind the line to hold his, and the other three cavalrymen's, horses. This is based on historical actuality.

You can play as Union or Rebel in any battle, and in each of the five game titles (Antietam, Bull Run, Chickamauga, Gettysburg and Shiloh) you can not only play the entire namesake battle but play one of a couple of dozen smaller and shorter associated "scenarios". For instance, in the Gettysburg game, you can play the Battle of Devil's Den, Little Round Top, Cemetery Ridge, Culp's Hill, and so on. This was in fact the nature of major Civil War battles - not entire huge armies slamming away at each other en masse but smaller, compartmentalized fights here and there at different times of day within the overall area (though maybe not at Shiloh, which in reality was just a godawful chaotic mess with fragmented lines pointing every which way and nobody really knowing who was on who's side or who they were shooting at, and nobody knowing what the hell they were doing or what was going on, like an all-in bar brawl times several thousand but with guns, and the way the game unfolds actually reflects that).

I haven't been able to play these games for years. They ran fine not only under Win 3.1 but also under Win95, 98, 2000, NT, XP and Vista. It wasn't until Win 7 that they would no longer run as they were 32-bit games and OSs from Windows 7 onwards were 64-bit affairs, so Windows would no longer tolerate them.

But along came GOG.com (Good Old Games). I don't know if you chaps are familiar with this site, but they specialize in resurrecting defunct old video games and reinvigorating them so that they will run under modern versions of OS. I picked up the whole Talonsoft CW set for 14 Aussie bucks, and they run just fine under W10.

Here's a few screenies:

This is the new-look main menu.

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This is a screenshot of a small scenario in "3D view" (Battle of Prairie Grove). You can see how elevations are represented by "raised" hexes. Near top-center is a hex outlined in red. This is the currently selected hex, and the panels along the bottom of the screen show which units currently occupy that hex - in this case a "Leader" unit ("Huston") and an artillery unit, along with their stats. Near the bottom of the screen are Confederate units, with brown "bases" (Union units have blue "bases", natch). There are five basic unit types: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, Leaders, and Supply Wagons. You can see a Union Supply Wagon at top right.

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This is a "2D view" of the same scenario.
You can switch, and play, in either mode on the fly, and each has two zoom levels (max shown in each).
"2D view" is fun if you want to reproduce the old tabletop board game look. I prefer the 3D view myself.

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Bear in mind that the original game was created for displays of 640 x 480 px (or whatever it was back then), so after translation to 1920 x 1080 px, the resultant playing pieces are tiny. But it doesn't actually matter because there are in-game indicators to show you which units are which and which way they're oriented (such was the thought which went into the game design). The games were always more about the strategy and less about the aesthetics.

These are seriously hardcore strategy games, so probably not to everyone's tastes. I could go on and on about what's involved, but you probably get the idea Suffice to say that each game used to come with a physical manual (remember those?) and they weren't skimpy.

I'm so stoked to be able to play these again I thought they were gone forever.

[PZ]

Nice synopsis of the hex games fragger! 

When I was a 17 year old kid in my first year of college I Had to stay at school even though my classes were sometimes hours apart. Consequently, I went to the library to see what I could discover and stumbled upon a Bruce Catton trilogy.  A Stillness at Appomattox was the first volume of three highlighting the history of the Army of the Potomac that fought primarily in Virginia (The other two volumes are Mr. Lincoln's Army and Glory Road.). I was spellbound with his writing style, which made me feel almost like I was there. Thus began a lifelong interest in the Civil War, history as a minor in college, and of course when I saw the CW hex game I just had to have it. I still have that game, and it is in almost pristine condition.

I will check out some of the digital version of the old hex games 

[fragger]

There's quite a few hex-based, turn-based video games of this nature out there, of varying quality and complexity. GOG.com have others, but I can't vouch for what they're like to play. I had another hex-based video game many years ago called "Steel Panthers" which was pretty good (WW2 European theater). GOG might have it, I haven't checked. These Battleground CW ones will keep me occupied for a good while.

Here's one more screenshot from Battleground CW, same scenario as before.
If you hold down SHIFT, labels appear showing location names on the map.
This is interesting if you're familiar with the history of the battle in question
as you can see where historical locations were in relation to the battle.

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As I said earlier, this is a small scenario. It's actually one of two bonus scenarios which come with the "Shiloh" game (the package from GOG.com gives you all five games, as shown in my first screenie of the main menu, and each game has a couple of dozen or so scenarios). Prairie Grove had nothing to do with the Shiloh battle as such and took place a few months later in Arkansas, but many of the same forces were involved. All the games except Gettysburg (the first title of the series to be released) had a few of these bonus scenarios, and in fact the Bull Run game is actually two games in one as it includes both "First" and "Second" Bull Run, with smaller scenarios associated with each. The Chikamauga game comes with the entire battle of Murfreesboro as a bonus, which is almost as big an affair as Gettysburg.

Roughly half the scenarios are historically accurate (meaning you start when and where they started, but of course it will immediately deviate from history as soon as you start moving units around). The other scenarios are "what ifs" - i.e. what if General So-And-So's division arrived earlier, or what if such-and-such a Corps had been here instead of there. Those can be quite interesting if you're up on the history. Even the full-scale battles have a "what if" version or two.

You should see the Gettysburg map, it's huge! And if you play the entire battle, it's all in the form of reinforcements which are constantly arriving on both sides, as happened in reality. As the Union player for instance, you start off with just two cavalry brigades (8 regiments) and a bit of artillery from Buford's Cavalry Division skirmishing with a couple of Confederate infantry brigades plus artillery, but as time goes by and the armies begin to arrive en masse, you end up having hundreds of units to manage. They just keep coming up. I played the entire battle once (when I had the games years ago) and it took me three months, playing a few hours each day on average.

Be warned, there is a fairly steep learning curve to these games. But there is an option which you can see in the "Main Menu" screenie in my last post called "Game Manual" which will load an extremely helpful, very well presented and comprehensive manual in PDF form. I would highly recommend to anyone getting into the Battleground games to have a good peruse of that. One neat thing is that the games themselves run in bog-standard windows, so you can minimize them, Alt-Tab among them or just select the one you want from the Taskbar. This lets you consult the PDF manual while you play, or do something else entirely - the game will just sit patiently in its window until you get back to it.

The only glitch of any sort I encounter is when I first load a scenario. An error appears saying "Video not available" (which was the original game intro video), but that's cool. I just click anywhere on the screen, the error goes away and the scenario begins as normal. Everyone gets this error apparently, from what I could gather online, but it's no biggie. Something to do with the video being created in a long-defunct format or something.

The devs had an interesting approach to starting a new game. At the start of a new scenario, you choose which side is "Manual" (human player) and which side is "Automatic" (computer player). You can make both sides "Manual" and play both sides yourself, or you can make both sides "Automatic" and just sit back and watch the computer play against itself. Why you'd want to do that I don't know... Normally of course, you make the side you want to be "Manual" and the pc opponent "Automatic". You can also play with or without the "fog of war" (making both sides "Manual" or both sides "Automatic" turns it off altogether).

Here's a quaint thing. You can play against another person via email. Remember, these games were originally made pre-internet. It's like playing chess by mail I did that with a mate once back in the day, it was kind of cool If I recall correctly, you made your move, and when you ended your turn, the game created a native game file of some sort, which you then attached to your email and sent. When the other player got the email, they'd copy the file into a specific game folder and when they reloaded their game, they hit a particular button and watched your move unfold, then made their move and went through the same procedure to send you their move. Ah, the days before the internet... There was also a modem-play option (and the option is still there in each game menu), but bloody hell, what a performance it was to set that up, having to muck around with baud rates and all that jazz... Nah.

Whoops, I waffled on again... Sorry

[PZ]

Really cool fragger 

Those games remind me of a series from the 1960's that I like called The Avengers, with Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg. There was one episode where there was an old coot that had a huge map on which he frantically moved game pieces.

One of these days I might try to get into one of these games. I still have Civilization V and Ultimate General: Gettysburg on Steam and I think I'll install them on my laptop. Who knows... maybe I'll actually play them this time.