Tag: PC Games

04/17/16

Twilight Struggle: An AAR – Part 1

How’s the new digital Twilight Struggle play? ~

Michael Eckenfels, 17 April 2016

Everything You Wanted To Know About Letting Godless Communists Overrun The World (But Were Afraid To Ask): A First Look/AAR on Twilight Struggle (GMT) on Steam

Twilight Struggle is a highly-rated board game by GMT that came out way back in 2005 (in fact, I reviewed it back in the day, somewhere else). It is an immensely popular one, too; BGG has it as the number one, number two, and number three game among war games, board games, and strategy games, respectively, on their site. It’s been a LONG while since I’ve played it, though we did try our hand in the forums a year or so ago (I think the links have long since been closed down, though). It took a while for things to come back to me, and I don’t think they fully did.

So, when this Steam version of Twilight Struggle was released, the first thing I checked was to see if there was an AI component to it (there is). Of course, the quickest way to learn a game is to get your butt handed to you by a pro at the game, but I figured it would be better to not try to be quite so awful when playing a live person, by trying out the AI, which was sure to be a min/maxing devil.

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04/9/16

GrogHeads Interviews Dr Ezra Sidran

The master of artificial intelligence returns to hobby gaming after a sojourn into the professional gaming world ~

Jim Owczarski, 09 April 2016

I write about wargames because I love them and want to share them with others.  One of the added benefits is being able to meet some of the people who made the games that stole away entire years of my life as I imagined myself Alexander, Grant, or, most frequently, Berthier.  I’m very pleased to have now added Dr. D. Ezra Sidran, designer of the seminal Universal Military Simulator and Universal Military Simulator II.

He’s recently returned to commercial wargame production after a while away — some of the reasons for which he goes into in this interview — to begin work on a new game based on the classic Kriegsspiel.  Titled General Staff, it promises to take a typically Sidranian (neologism for “awfully damned different”) look at digital wargaming along with a level of A.I. that I myself had once described as chimerical.

He was kind enough to answer my questions, even those which were likely of interest only to myself, and along the way talk about his games old and new, digital wargames in the neolithic era (the 1980s), and what he’s been up to since companies like Firebird, Rainbird, and even Microprose closed their doors.

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