Black Legend

(bam-a-lam)

Welcome to the low countries, ca. half-past... oooh... awk-waaaard.

Ummm, I didn't do it.

Yeah, we're in that period of European history. Bring your own bier.

 

I wanted less cartoony team tactics after Inkulinati and Elemental Evil, so Black Legend's grim, low-key aesthetic drew me in. The average gamer's age may be in the thirties now, but you wouldn't know it from the chibified, bubblegummy, bright and cozy kindergarten atmosphere developers adopt to go along with their sappy plots. But I digress.

 

If you're looking for actual role-playing, with moral decisions, branching quests and so forth, you won't find it here. What Black Legend does offer is an immersive, if linear, meander through the byways of a musket-era low fantasy setting.

I like that everything's been knocked over except the two-story-tall pillar of floppy sacks. Also, how is everyone in this town starving? There must be grain in at least some of these. Add a dog steak and you're living large. Anyway, visit scenic Grant, home among others to Christiaan Huygens (who for some reason does not use a telescope as a weapon) and to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, cozy among his vats of animalcules. 

(You looked less... fermented, in your official portrait.)

Those pips around our character icons represent "unbalanced bodily humors" which comprise the alchemical combat system's main damage source. Stack them on your enemy, cash them in with a special attack scaling with adjacent combos. And they do work, the difference between a basic attack and triple combo being from single digits to triple, up to the thousands by the end-game. Technically there's also a large variety of buffs and debuffs, but since you couldn't address them individually even if such mechanics existed, functionally there are only humor stacks and a generic "debuff" category you can safely ignore. While interesting, it also means the quality of the mobs you fight matters little compared to whether they outnumber you, stacking more counters than you and triggering them before you can even act, and conversely that boss fights are trivialized by you outnumbering the boss 4-1. Flanking gives a nice damage bonus, but the lack of zones of control jumbles combat, especially as mobs are coded to act a bit too randomly to make for interesting tactics.

 

If you're noticing a pattern of interesting but flawed features, you can probably guess most of what I'm saying will fit "indie game" caveats. Some good ideas, some talent, but visibly over-stretched past the developers' means.

 

In a way Black Legend is a less ambitious but more playable take on Mordheim's urban scavenging, and though the interface doesn't interfere nearly as much it's once again a main source of frustration.

- moving takes an extra click

- chugging a pot requires a gratuitous submenu

- a "helpful" feature to speed up turn ends can cost you your last action

- you can speed up animations but as usual the problem is the prep and cleanup phases taking longer than actual motion

- ability icons get re-arranged on your hotbar or inexplicably appear/disappear from class selection

- attack lines occasionally fail to predict range and line of sight

- tooltips do not provide some critical info, like minimum/maximum range

- you initiate fights by entering your foes' field of vision... except when entering the rough area of a boss, whereupon your character automatically walks over to him initiating combat, preventing you from pre-fight preparations

- you get a map and a minimap but only the mini version displays your position

- clicking a portrait just zooms to that character instead of selecting it in the pre-fight screen

 

Individually, such little flaws can be ignored, but a dozen clunky interactions will begin to wear on you after the three hundredth repetition. Then some stuff is just bugged, even years after release, like tiles falsely appearing as occupied or out of range.

 

All in all, you get the feeling someone had planned a piece of period fiction and suddenly decided to make it a video game despite lacking the requisite programming or design expertise. As with Wartile or We Happy Few for example, quite a few mechanics feel tacked on after a design lead read a listicle on "the 10 top ways to keep players' interest" most notably the numerous loot boxes:

- and the constantly spammed "LEVEL UP" behavioral reinforcers. Black Legend uses a combat system I can't remember having tried before, where your ability scores determine your damage and your weapon your available abilities. 

Why yes, ladies, I am happy to see you.

In order to gain more abilities, you constantly need to swap each character to different class/weapon combos every few fights. Less chaotic than it sounds, as you'll still want to follow a general archetype (tank, melee and range DPS, healer) for each of your four, but get more wiggle room for cross-class combos. Interesting. But though this individual skill leveling pretty much removes the need for traditional character levels, the devs decided to keep those in as well. You'll LEVEL UP!!! ~120 times per party member during your campaign, with zero choices to upgrade, each time gaining a minor attribute boost, the whole routine obviously serving as no more than a dopamine drip.

 

Other features also seem tacked on per "industry standards" like map encounters randomized every time you re-enter zone, plenty of recruits even though they're all interchangeable, a few mid-campaign fetch quests to make you trudge through random respawns again (admittedly, less than in other games) infinite loot rendering the unsortable item list at the shop irrelevant. Like the interface issues, none of these would be too severe in themselves, but their self-conscious implementation as operant conditioning does more harm than good.

 

Because there really is a nice game under there.

The decor is solid, the mood grim without becoming maudlin, enemy abilities decently varied, the grand total of two character models (human and dog) reskinned and animated just enough to keep you entertained for twenty hours, weapon and armour both varied and recherche and scaling nicely from basic to ornate, the music, meh, just sounds like bot-generated whooshing, but the voice acting would sound surprisingly good even for a richer project. And the writing, while not taking itself too seriously and having some fun with random Dutch references, manages to stay in character

Yup. We're in the slums.

even in its more tongue-in-cheek moments. 

You think this is a game!?

The loot boxes, if a bit excessive, do keep you exploring the convoluted zones' scenic nooks. Fifteen playable classes add up to a bit of redundancy, but for the most part offer a lot of chances to mix-and-match damage sources for combos. Me being me, I could always cite more minor quibbles like why would you call your incendiary devices "molotovs" when "Greek fire" would have better fit the alchemical setting?

 

But in the end, I enjoyed wandering the canals, alchemisted and guisarmed to the teeth, reading street signs for directions, inflicting Science! upon flagellants. I find myself hoping Warcave made enough cash off this stumbling but promising first effort to stay in business. I'd like to see more from them.

AoW4 Factions, 7

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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Ah, my first dragon. AoW4 rulers need not be the same race as their factions, and in the case of later ruler types like dragons, giants or eldritch abominations, they flat-out cannot be. So it was a nice chance to play an evil orc faction, ignoring Triumph's trendy noble savage reinterpretation of orcs for some good old-fashioned death cult stuff. As with all these early factions the flavor text was added long after the fact, but I like the way it came out. I've done this sort of call-and-response cult leader routine for a couple of others. It suits the "awakened ancient evil" pretty damn well if I do say so myself. All-out necromancy also meshed well with dragon powers making up for the early weakness of relying on skeletons, once I learned not to bankrupt my mana pool raising too many of them.

Hie Thee to Space, Cowboy

"Now I'm lost in a sea of sunken dreams
While the sound of drunken screams echoes in the night"

 

Brandi Carlile - Dying Day

 

 

Continuing my thoughts on space cowboys, I chanced a sub-genre which should have been right up my apocalyptic-minded alley, Jack Vance's Dying Earth books. From the very first couple of short stories I was surprised to find his influence quite palpable in role-playing games -- and only then remembered the D&D spell memorization mechanic is indeed occasionally called "vancian" magic. Not to diminish the touch of Tolkien's fantasy races and Moorcock's chaos/order conflict and even older works, but the general feel of D&D, of "you all meet in a tavern" and the confused mix of tech and magic and quest hooks and magic devices and the adventuring party and bluff checks appears to owe most and most directly to Vance. He may not have originated all of them, but a surprising number of little details like, say grues and de(m)odands, prismatic sprays or the imprisonment spell and such-and-such-wizard's such-and-such-spell made it into game lingo over the decades. Which is not to call these, in themselves, detailed.

 

I've only bothered with the first couple of volumes, and am unlikely to continue. Being published decades apart ('50, '66, '83) those first two at least each read slightly different. The eponymous first is a collection of random short stories and has a more general fairytale atmosphere with alternate worlds, gigantic gods embodied, fair maids riding horses through meadows, a character shrunken and put in a jar, etc. The Eyes of the Overworld is another string of disparate chapters only slightly held together by featuring the same picaresque protagonist, but feels more consciously post-LotR in its more down-to-earth themes. In both cases though it takes very little time to spot weakness after weakness in the writing.

 

In his notion of preindustrial manners and mores Vance seemed content with mimicking Alexandre Dumas, with every single possible character from wizards to fishermen, priests to scullions and princesses to rat-men discoursing up and down, from phrase to phrase and page to page in nothing but the pompous, flowery boasts and imprecations of ancien regime dandies. His world-building is in fact... none of such. The geography could as easily be flipped upside down and jigsawed backwards. Grues, deodands, demons and other monsters are all the same breed of nondescript boogeymen. He may as well have called them all goblins or vampires. Per pulp fantasy routine, impressive-sounding place names and ancient empires lie strewn through the text, most forgotten by the next sentence, and even the few recurring ones no more developed than "place hero visited" with, if they're very lucky, precisely one colorful custom.

 

But to me the most infuriating part was the title: The Dying Earth. You'd think that would have something to do with it. No it does not. About once every other short story, a character might toss in a phrase like 'in this time when the sun is dying' to remind you what the setting should ostensibly concern. "Turjan of Miir" begins with the notion of preserving humanity before devolving to generic spell-slinging and "Guyal of Sfere" manages, by its last couple of pages, to scrape up a thematically appropriate concern for the preservation of knowledge in the face of decay. Aside from that, the entire opus may as well have been set at Scarborough Fair for all it matters. There's nothing to it but the same utterly generic sword-and-sorcery tripe supplied by a thousand other contemporaries. Even the few repetitions of "the sun will go black" make no sense. How often do you think about the sun eventually going orange? Or having shone brighter upon Snowball Earth? Societies which display no other notion of time or history, each isolated tribe utterly unmoored from its global context, somehow all uniformly know and believe this one token scene-setting sound bite, an event so slow they would have no way of tracking it. And it affects their lives not in the slightest.

Had these books not been picked up by DnD, would anyone remember them? Hell, considering even I was willing to try a second volume (more than I did for E.E. Smith) maybe Vance did something right after all. Look at the Numenera setting taking up and running with the 'use magic device' skill displayed by characters pointing tubes of blue whatever at each other in Eyes of the Overworld. Look at the roguish thieving Cugel disarming traps in a wizard's mansion (albeit by poking random furniture with a stick) and it's not hard to see how among the budding pastime of role-playing games in the '70s, players could let their imaginations fill in what became class features. The very vagueness of Vance's random babbling, the half-assed name-dropping of imaginary locales and featureless monsters, invites 'this would read cooler as:' extrapolation. (And probably explains why so many of his fans try to emulate such nonsense sensibilities.)

 

That's probably the best influence bad writing can hope to exert.

 

For comparison, though (so as not to rehash my overused reference to The Time Machine) try a very brief 1949 story by Arthur C. Clarke called The Forgotten Enemy. Here we have, just as the central point unjustly claimed by those Dying Earth buckle-swashes, Clarke's human remnants dwindling in the face of a cosmic shift. But this time the plot stays true to the central theme, the protagonist's circumstances changing according to logical ramifications, the conclusion fully in keeping with the premise.

 

More than other factors, that separates true speculative fiction from space cowboys, space operas, unresearched historical fiction and fantasy worlds whose characters are indistinguishable from adolescents of the writer's own social milieu. Is the setting in fact relevant? Or did the writer substitute the supernatural for incompetence in conveying both the super and the natural?

 

But, conversely, this also demonstrates our need for speculation. Fine, yes, send your cowboys to space. Just don't forget to make the space count for something. Even slapped together as a superficial pretext, the fantastic can spark activity in other minds who will complete the original half-baked idea, in a way that yet another war story or domestic drama simply will not. Half a century of dice and character sheets may not necessarily count as a writer's saving grace, but it's at least a saving throw.

AoW4 Factions, 6

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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Those like myself who grew up reading The Lost World and watching The Flintstones still hold a sense of amazement at the confirmation of the dinosaur>bird lineage. It helped that dragons were put into the game around this same time for an extra big lizard tie-in. On the battlefield, these are some nasty hard-hitting pretty pollys too, so long as I time the first strike salvo correctly. Muskets and astral nuking. Big badda-boom. For a bonus, the dragonkin transformation (extra crits as they lose health) also rewards a death-or-glory charge.

(edit: Looking back on this now, I don't like how much the flavor text ended up sounding like my elvish factions. Oh well. It's probably the antiquity angle skewing my affectations.) 

Harrison Bergeron

"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"Hell emission
Sell emotion
Sick devotion
Down in the gutter"

 

Velvet Acid Christ - Caustic Disco

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It's news to me that (according to TVTropes at least) there have supposedly been various moves to read Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron backwards, as a parody of dystopian fiction. Sounds like a bunch of Lit. students ran out of thesis ideas again. ("See the cradle? See the cat?") I suppose his somewhat flippant black humor would be easy to mistake for parody if you'd never noticed he employed the same in even grimmer contexts.

 

If Vonnegut mocked anything in the field, it was the highfalutin' tone of standard dystopian villains, the bloviating political scholars masterminding the brainwashing of the populace via secretive and sophisticated technological and psychological methods accessible only to some reclusive aristocratic cabal. Here, on the other hand, the end of civilization is not a fiendishly plotting mad scientist. It's a thug with a shotgun, standing up for the average Joe.

 

While Fahrenheit 451 has distinguished itself among famous dystopian works by illustrating the bottom-up anti-intellectual nature of information-age social decline so long before it became obvious, Bergeron closed the gap last decade as the political correctness police began actively enforcing the handicapping of anyone they deemed 'privileged' in the name of 'equity' to the point forcing you to wear a weighted yoke no longer falls outside the realm of their political discourse.

 

But Vonnegut's vision warrants even more recognition vis-a-vis ramping technological invasion of personal attention like infinite scrolling following on the heels of pop-ups and other ever more intrusive advertisement, algorithmically tailored personal content feeds, Linked-In spamming messages that You Are Being Watched and of course, most recently, chat-bots. For a decade I was aware my own attention span was shrinking, that I am increasingly prone to skim rather than read, clicking thoughtlessly back and forth through browser tabs, picking up whatever game quest pops up next. But then I was assuming I'd kill myself soon, so it just seemed a natural part of my decline. Might I presume that mindset illustrative of our entire society's willingness to succumb?

In case you got distracted and missed the point, Bergeron's dystopia imposes never gonna give you up equality by weighing down the strong and fast, by masking the beautiful never gonna let you down, and most importantly by forcing anyone of more than a gnat's intelligence to run around and desert you wear headphones blaring random noises at random intervals, constantly disrupting the thinking of everyone deemed a danger to the peace of mind of peaceful minds. Methods as crass and primitive as befits the system's populist rhetoric. Why just limit, manipulate, subjugate and police thought when you can outright prevent it?

Those computer game random pop-up barbarian attacks I cited last Sunday made me think back to said headphones. In a strategy game, it's a given that some places will be safer than others, that you will define front lines, guarded flanks and pastoral backwaters, that you will shift resources according to a greater, long-term... y'know... strategy? As with other examples like Ixion or cRPGs' overuse of ambushes behind doors or any other system where anything can blow up at any moment, those barbies teleporting in from offscreen seemed to imitate the handicapper general jumping in from stage left with her shotgun.

 

[Kramer bursts in. Audience cheers]

But don't forget why we have this. Because it sells. Because this definition of "fun" which should amuse none older than an infant without object permanence is upheld by 9/10 of our fellow apes. Serenity now.

 

As a last point, it seems many cannot reconcile Vonnegut's socialist views with his egalitarian dystopia. Except of course imposing equality is by no means implied when preventing wealth from imposing inequality. By the way, the rich are robbing you faster than ever. In the end, it turns out the thought-erasing headphones were merely sold in stores, and bought up by an all-too-eager audience.

Glossing Over

While not germane to my point at the time, the illustration for this post did not depict a lake as might be assumed. It was the Mississippi, iced over.

The mist which yielded these lovely otherworldly views -

- had settled upon the already frozen landscape quite heavily one night, in between several days of deep freeze. The predawn chill froze it where it lay. Which was everywhere. Sure, I've seen (and slipped on) iced-over roads before. I've seen the odd tree wrapped in frost before.

But I do wish to emphasize: everywhere. Every tree. Every leaf. Every fence.

Every individual blade of grass was flash-frozen in a crystal coffin that would've made Snow White jealous.

Best of all, the fog bank had covered entire counties, heavy and uninterrupted. As I drove out to the river, save for the freshly salted roads I think you could find at least twenty square kilometers, grass, houses, trees, trash cans, everything encased in a single massive, contiguous, transparent layer of glaze. The world had been vitrified.

 

Sure, it's not unique. But as rare as eclipses. Ah, when they make days like this, they break the mold. Literally.

Cutting through the Treacle: Raiders of the Leisure Park

"He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any particular point in stopping a good walk to wallop small balls"

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"The more you suffer

The more it shows you really care"

 

The Offspring - Self Esteem

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"There seems a broad consensus not even so much that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he'd like at something he doesn't especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief."

[...]

[Citing an interviewee] "it is one of the guiding principles of social relations here: if you're not destroying  your mind and body via paid work, you're not living right."

David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

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"He had no pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and hard work. [...] There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion."

H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay

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I still play Northgard occasionally. While hardly the best strategy game, it continues to bait me into reinstalling every year or so. Then I end up uninstalling it for annoyance at its combat mechanics and the computer cheating as it usually does in such games. I especially hate it including a designated griefer class.

As the raven clan represents The All-Father himself, you might excuse a bit of overpower. The problem being they gave it a lot more bit. Its main gimmick is sending boats of mercenaries to raid any player at any time. Attacking without risking its own population would be a powerful enough ability in itself (the lynx clan gets by well enough with that alone) but the mercs are dirt-cheap, roughly match the growth curve of a faction's military by themselves, and give only a three-second warning when they're about to hit, giving the defender no chance to relocate his army which is probably at the other end of his territory since the shore is every player's starting zone. Sure, you can relocate your workers and let the raid complete, but simply losing access to that resource production for the duration is, again, a hefty punishment in itself. Most relevant to my upcoming point, these attacks can be spammed. You'll likely get hit more often by raven raids than by every other source put together.

 

But of course there's more to it than just giving Odin his due pomp and circumstance bonus. To game designers, the spam is a goal in itself.

 

Old World, another strategy game, turn-based this time, reminded me of this while bashing my head against it trying to actually finish a match with Hatti. The principal issue being that sometime during the past year, Mohawk ramped up one of their more annoying features I'd previously held off on disabling, distant raids. Basically, cities at the edge of the map (which would otherwise be relatively safe) get randomly hit with barbarian invasions from offscreen. Stronger ones, in fact, than you would encounter when fighting an actual barbarian city present on the map. Note the five units coming in at the top of the image, the devastation from the previous five units I'd wiped out during the last two turns, and if you check the minimap, five more little red dots below the visible area. What was once an occasional three-mook digression is now forcing you to divert all your military forces, if you can even afford it. A fifteen-mook pile-up is more or less... a war.

For a bonus, when I hit the main menu to disable the stupid raids, I discovered this previously separate mechanic had been folded into the general "difficulty" setting, making it impossible to, say, play under the harsher resource handicap without also accepting the pop-up barbies. Note they actually went out of their way to remove that setting after implementation, to restrict players' options years after the fact. This also came at the same time that raider AI was tweaked to have them prioritize causing random damage instead of trying to beat your defenders (a.k.a. griefing) and soon after disasters were implemented, which also break random improvements requiring reconstruction. Triple redundancy, all toward randomly breaking your shit with no recourse.

 

A quarter century ago, or certainly by the era of Civilizations 3 and 4, developers had gradually begun phasing out the old '90s "whack-a-mole" mechanics (like the series' nuclear fallout requiring individual cleanup) in favor of rarer events more threatening individually but less of a constant chore. Now it appears the moles are back in town.

Why?

 

I mean, sure, from the company's point of view, never ignore the timesink factor. Every designer, every screenwriter, every Dickens loves 'em sum filler, and the raids increase the number of clicks required to get through the middle portion (expand > exploit) of a campaign. Also, the newer generation of strategy games all introduce a limiting resource which cannot be increased by normal territorial/economic expansion to put the brakes on players' steamrolling. Old World's answer to AoW4 / Stellaris' influence or EU4's monarch powers is Orders, and nothing eats up orders faster than fighting. Problem being this so artificially yanks that choke-chain around players' necks that one would think they'd protest the change. Do they?

 

I caused a bit of indignation on an MMO guild forum some 15-20(?) years ago when some cretin demanded to know "you think you better than us" and I replied "yes, because I make things harder for myself" and in my defense I did not in fact consider this so heinous a departure from mundane gamer braggadocio. Every schmuck brags about having beaten difficulty level N+1. Was it so different from me refusing to use an overpowered item in order to beat difficulty N? Because I'm really quite good at making my own life harder; you don't have to help me with that. In Old World, in fact, I roleplay and self-handicap by establishing perennial Platonic philosopher king rule. (One reason I hatey Hatti is that it lacks a researcher family, but I make do with bureaucrats.) This blocks me from what gameplay options Scholar heads of state cannot undertake (like proposing alliances) and imposes a constantly mounting relations penalty from the two families whose purpurous keisters shalt never toucheth the ivory throne of academe, eventually resulting in rebel units spawning at their cities. In other words, I make my own distant raids.

 

I don't doubt that if I shop around I will find more examples of random spawns and other busywork being re-added to various genres. It fits too well with other idiot-friendly trends of the past few years like the decline of online FPS back to deathmatch or the final replacement of ever-shrinking MMO raids with individual Diablo-clone loot grinding.

 

So sure, idiot-friendly simplification is one issue, and those same idiots tend to interpret hyperactivity as excitement, and repetition can be addictive... but is that all? Because I think Old World has finally elucidated the real outrage I caused on that forum back around 2009. It wasn't about who's playing the more difficult challenge. It's the 'for myself' that rankled most. Playing an unoptimized build, giving my fighter 14 STR instead of 18, denying the desirability of the supposed 'best' status symbols for which others struggle. Smashing their tablets of virtues. All so evil.

 

Because to the average retard, all definitions must be imposed from above. The value of effort in a game is no different from the value of effort in real life, that is to say a reflection of one's affiliation with the apes at the top of the tribe's power hierarchy. So just as in real life 'work' does not count as such unless it is servitude to multibillionnaires, playing a game gets defined not by an objective weighing and multifaceted combination of advantages and handicaps, of what would make for interesting gameplay, but by ticking off lists of achievements and top scores arbitrarily defined by the marketing department. At the same time, note the powergamer outrage at anyone refusing to take every obvious advantage (e.g. min-maxing stats) despite such advantages again being defined and handed out by authority and not a reflection of the player's creativity. They want to be made to work at the game just as they play at working the job they are made to keep in meatspace. It's Nietzschean slave morality at its basest, defining oneself by the master's goals, and it's hardly the first time I've cited this tendency in computer games. *

 

It's funny, when MMOs first came out shortly before Y2K with their initial subscription models, the sheer effort involved prompted many to decry "that sounds like a second job more than a game" yet a quarter century later the only facet of online games which remains is the job aspect. Gone are forty-man raids and organization and complex character builds and malleable playable worlds. Now just do what you're told. Punch the clock religiously for your daily log-in rewards. Kill ten to the tenth rats for an achievement unlock. Cheat and sabotage your coworkers. Powerlevel. Grind the single easiest instance for constant loot. After a brief revival of more interesting gameplay around the mid-2010s, the same pattern is reasserting itself in single-player. No complex morality, no complex narratives, no complex goals. Goblin pops up. Smack it with a mallet. Get a LEVEL UP! message.

 

Sure, it's only one facet of our society-wide decline. Humans are less and less self-directed in their thoughts and actions, led by the nose by religious indoctrination and state propaganda and advertising and more recently social media echo chambers and even more recently copy-pasting chatbots. But observing how thoroughly it pervades even our escapist fantasies gives the lie to accusations of nefarious manipulation from above. It sells. It's the rabble dragging us down. It is the human animal, the naked ape which does not want to think and continually retrenches in mindless reaction of its own accord. Subhumanity kills.

 

 

 

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* If you don't think games reflect the morality of our corporate overlords, lemme ask ya this: have any of your Civilizations ever hit a crisis of overproduction? Or is maximizing profit and extracted labor always the right answer?

(There is one golden oldie which slightly bucked the trend, Alpha Centauri and Planet's revolt against industry.)