Abetting the Setting

"My theories are borrowed from somewhere else
And I've never had too many to talk about
'Cause you were real quick and you were quick to point out, well
That was borrowed too"

 

Ugly Casanova - Diggin' Holes

 

 

From my first swipes at Europa Universalis 4 I wasn't crazy about the far larger density of scripted events compared to #3. Granted this is partly a matter of taste, being a bigger fan of strategy than of historical re-enactment, but such events can quickly overshadow whatever theme you had intended for your campaign. Aragon, for instance, gets several major freebie options for peaceful annexation during its early game (Naples, Navarre, Castile) whose overwhelming benefit dictated my early strategy of maxing diplomacy (national focus, +2 advisor) but going on a charm offensive instead of the naval/trade offensive I had originally envisioned. I will say though, I may wrinkle my nose at the implementation but at least Paradox maintains solid justification throughout, avoiding veering from the game's historical grounding, consistently feeding greater immersion and not tossing random shit at the wall to see if it sticks.

 

Which is not to say sticking to central theme completely avoids weirdness. Take Old World:

It's a Boss Baby prequel, just roll with it.

History, after all, is verifiably weird in many places, child monarchs being the least of it. On the other hand, Old World's enfilade of early monotheisms has repeatedly tempted writers to place more emphasis on the supernatural than feels natural to a naturalistic setting. It's a given that your citizens would believe nonsense, quite another to make it a verifiable in-game force. The blessed/cursed attributes (altering your ruler's random positive/negative event chance) always struck me as out of place, and the newer natural disaster expansion plays around with prophetic dreams and such. Still they cultivate a light touch, thankfully, where more amateurish developers tend to smack you in the face with such digressions.

 

Vagrus is a fantasy RPG set in a Romanesque evil empire with half-elves, half-dragons, half-ants and several other halves, all shooting fireballs and swashing their bronze buckle(r)s. Yet when I traveled to the obligatory Thousand and One Nights expansion, I was greeted with this.

Yes, everyone's fighting over oil wells. As in petroleum. Crude, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. Mullah lubricant. Whatever happened to olives and sesame? Instead of the simplistic and anachronistic Arabs=Oil, why not dip into middle-eastern references more appropriate to the old-timey setting like the spice trade or the silk road, which would've meshed so much better with Vagrus' core caravan-management motif, or hell, why not Arabs' obsession with horses? Or a Persian-themed demon-slaying fire cult aping Zoroastrianism? Or a militarily brilliant lame upstart princeling denied noble title for lack of lineage but expanding a namesake empire off said spice/silk trade. Or dive even deeper to show locals pouring libations to their dead relatives in Ereshkigal's domain? Or if you want to go the Egyptian route, a lizard cult evoking Sobek, since you've already got lizard mounts and nonsensical dinos as random encounters? Why the fuck with the derricks out of nowhere?

 

Sure, Vagrus already featured occasional modern elements like your dwarf companion's pistol, but that at least was presented as a rarity and even then just a primitive flintlock that takes an extra round to reload and is painfully inaccurate, as early firearms were. (At least it doesn't blow up in his face as they were wont to do. Don't ask me where he's getting the powder.) Even if you wanted black viscous petro-oleum in your game, you could've stuck to ancient surface extraction and the odd shallow well; crude, unrefined fuel and tar seeing limited local use, not a full-blown mechanized industry over which wars are fought.

 

It's worth comparing how Tolkien for example got away with his own anachronisms, like the bomb at Helm's Deep and the pterosaur mounts. For one, they're very limited in scope. For another, they're contextualized as departures from the norm showing the unnaturalness of both Saruman's futurism and Sauron's brutish, prehistoric primitivism. Yes, yes, you're allowed to roll your eyes a bit at the Shire's cozy Edwardian provincialism (not to mention the books' larger monarchist/medievalist slant) but that secure grounding allows small departures from such norms to spice without glutting. Coherence matters. (Just please don't look for it on this blog.)

 

You might raise an eyebrow, for instance, at Cyberpunk 2077 throwing Buddhist monks into its dingy futuristic mix... but dinginess makes a fine fit for those sworn to poverty, so there you have the same angle of building on an existing theme. The first quest you encounter concerns two brothers targeted by a street gang for forcible mechanical implantation.

You can later revisit the dilemma: though the artificiality of the modern world is opposed to their sought purity, they don't see it as an absolute impediment, merely a lengthening of the path.

Thus it becomes just another angle on Night City's culture of excess, bringing everything back to the central theme. It contrasts nicely with punk rage as well:

As another series of seemingly chance encounters has a monk feeding you meditations on your elemental constituents... via a neural interface. And that's all. A quest consisting of sitting peacefully in various damp, airy, sunlit meadow cutscenes... and don't spoil the ending for me 'cause I don't think I've finished it yet. But once again, though seemingly random, this element feeds back into the game's central theme of raging against the machine - both in rage and machine. And honestly, you could probably substitute Franciscans for the same effect, were you able to turn to facets you actually need for your narrative and downplay or throw out whatever superficialities or heavy-handed moralizing fundamentalists would want included. It's not as if William Gibson didn't do the same with voodoo themes forty years ago.
 

However, many of the worst cases of such digression are not meant to integrate with the rest of the story at all, but are thrown in to browbeat the audience with a supposedly all-important moral lesson. It's harder to find anything made in the 2010s which doesn't fall in that trap, but as just one example within the medium of games, try Dead State which among other ill-advised soapboxing gave us the NPC companion Karen, who turns out to be in the early stages of pregnancy and demands an abortion. Because it's her body, her choice, full stop, and only an anti-abortionist filthy-male-pig-reactionary-loser-fundamentalist-etc. would deny her this absolute right.

Great?

Now don't ask me what the hell this has to do with blasting zombies' heads off.

 

Of course, there could have been endless ways to work the issue into the plot of your survival shelter, as a pregnancy would raise any number of practical and ethical concerns relevant to the situation.

Do you have adequate medical facilities?

Can your makeshift tribe provide the material resources to ensure an infant's care? Have you looted any baby formula and diapers?

Can you other scavengers afford to support her while she's bloated to uselessness or has a parasite attached to her nipples? And is it fair to ask that of you?

Would someone else be willing to raise the child after birth, lessening her burden?

Are you in a secure location where you can start a long-term community?

For that matter, as you have zero information about the world at large, might you assume humanity has been wiped out and you desperately need every scrap of genetic diversity you can get to rebuild the species? 

Never mind all that because our real priorities are having her take umbrage at the very notion of possibly maybe questioning her choice, browbeating you for not supporting her enough and breaking up with her boyfriend and self-inducing an abortion with a random pill overdose (meant to make her look heroic) because woman right, man wrong, nothing else matters. That they named this bitch "Karen" just a few years before that became a meme is just icing on the cake.

 

Maybe your story can accommodate an inexplicable dinosaur or oil rig or some superstitious blather, maybe it cannot. Cases differ. I suppose the real question to ask yourself is: are you being a Karen about it?

 

 

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P.S.: Don't forget to lube your mullah!

Setting the Netting

"If it happens again I shall worry

That only a strange ship could fly"

 

Sting - The Wild, Wild Sea 

 

 

My recent Europa Universalis 4 campaign surprised me with a bit more novelty than I thought it could muster after half a dozen runs. For one thing, like Scotland and in contrast to the Teutons or Uzbek Khanate, Aragon runs into an old problem of finding a job for Aquaman. Ever since I got into strategy games in the '90s, ever since Civ 2, C&C: Red Alert and Warcraft 2, the idea of having two separate realms of gameplay has run into constant balance issues. A hard distinction between land and sea units leaves ships either utterly useless or utterly crucial. In particular, the need for transports to carry land units raises a whole separate balance issue of vulnerability. Is it fair for an embarked unit with 20 armor to get sunk because its transport only has 2?

 

Though I eschewed the New World colonial race this time around, the Spanish armada nonetheless proved crritical to not only protecting my various island holdings but denying enemies quick deployment. For instance the Ottoman Empire vastly outnumbered me on land, but forcing it to schlep across the North-African coast by foot bought me the time to siege its ally Morocco before reinforcements could reach. It's a bit all-or-nothing. Once I had that naval superiority... I had it. End of story. My fleet only grew with the scores upon scores of vessels I captured, for free, with enemies unable to even deny me safe harbors without conquering me completely, since every coastal province can dock infinity vessels. It's always completely one-sided. One side of every war rules the waves and is the only one who can ship troops. What, no sneaky black sails under cover of darkness? Especially looking at Britain utterly failing to control The Channel across several playthroughs, I kept flashing back to Dunkirk and wondering why I can't commandeer a bunch of merchant vessels for some kind of limited access beyond the old Warcraft spiky turtle dependence.*

 

At least ships providing faster travel for a logistic advantage and not just a numeric one is a solid concept, though it can be taken too far. I don't know what Civilization's doing these days, but its competitor Old World gives every ship a next-turn "anchor" action establishing a traversable radius around it so long as it remains inactive. You can chain these zones to create pontoon bridges over infinite distances.

While my navy was too small for a full-scale invasion, I eked a narrow victory over the Carthaginians there by quickly anchoring my few ships and snagging a couple of low-value city sites in the southeast, impractically far from the mainland and with too little land around them for any other purpose but a couple of extra points. But making the crossing nigh-instantaneous can be stupidly overpowered.

Playing as Greece (bloo) vs. Assyria (yeller) our war quickly degenerated into a perpetual stalemate. The sole overland route connecting west and east consisted of exactly three hexes at the very northern edge of the map (the rest being a mountain range all the way to the sea) making it impossible for either side to mount or reinforce a push. Island-hopping along the center archipelago (two turns to cross half the map) was a nice strategic challenge, and opening up that second front all the way across their empire (as EU4's algorithm tries to do every single war) did indeed lead to eventual victory. Not risking instantaneous unit loss when losing a transport is a nice change (your units either can cross or cannot, and do so in a single turn spending no time at sea) but turning creaky triremes into infinite-range, effortless science fantasy teleporters is a bit much.

 

Age of Wonders does have teleporters, and has done away with naval transports. Much as in Heroes of Might and Magic, units "embark" when you order them into water and fight under some penalties unless they're aquatic/amphibious/flying. For some little while at the start it did feature actual ships as naval units, but eliminated even those as extraneous. Not an ideal situation either, as it removes some player decision-making in deliberately building up sea power.

 

Weird how long the naval transport issue has gone without a clear best option. My own personal favorite would be something like a more purposeful, resource-dependent version of HoMM/AoW "embarking" which stuck in my mind ever since playing Armageddon: allowing the player to buy a motorized transport for each unit as upgrade, of varying quality, activated at will. Of course, "my little pocket ponies" were even mocked in old MMOs, and in some settings like historical grand strategy, seeing your infantry pull a galleon out of its ass may look just a mite queer.

 

Can't wait to see how Bannerlord handles this in its Viking expansion.

 

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* There is a reason for this limited interpretation in mass media dominated for eighty years by Americans' obsession with their moment of glory at D-day, a rare example where the question really was an all-or-nothing, massive disembarkation from purpose-made transports.

 

There's an even simpler marketing-driven explanation for keeping transports as separate units for so long, as every company wanted to drive up its unit count as volume of content.

Are A Gonner Universalis

After my establishment and subsequent loss of Nova Scotia last campaign, preceded by Uzbek and Teuton playthroughs, I wasn't quite sure what to play next. Maybe another European nation before tackling the Indian Ocean, but I'm not too enchanted with the way New World colonies are handled in EU4 (automatically breaking away from your direct control as permanent vassals) so maybe something in the North? Maybe something in the East? Maybe some- wait, it turns out I already chose Aragon some months ago and forgot about it, so I guess we're playing Aragon.

 

Likely true of 15th-century Aragon historically, I appear a naval power. Mallorca, Malta, Sardinia, Sicily, not to mention my most obvious route for early expansion lies along the North-African coast, plus my hardcoded pahtnah Naples is only reachable by love boat.

The biggest problem of course is starting at a disadvantage next to the two worst superpowers, France and Castile, so I decided to pursue an anti-French strategy. Allied Savoy, Burgundy and Castile in addition to my junior partner Naples to start.

- 1447 lose Naples in a scripted event, inherit a personal union with Navarre by royal marriage

- 1456 Castille calls me in against Morocco and Tunis as part of its Granada campaign. Oh no, not the briar patch! And, shockingly, Castille actually awards me three provinces around Kabylia in the peace treaty, giving me a North-African foothold.

- 1460 Iberian Wedding event makes Castille junior partner

- 1467 still putting down revolts, lose my Burgundian alliance for refusing to defend them against France - turns out it would have been a pointless fight anyway, as after the war France immediately takes over all of Burgundy in a dynastic event

- 1473 Ally England as traditional ally against France

- 1488 England calls me in to defend against France. Not much chance of success. Predictably, England sits back and does absolutely nothing while France over-runs the Iberia Peninsula. At least I have Castilla watching my back. Almost bankrupting myself with 25 loans buys me enough mercenaries to eke out a truce.

- 1499 Integrate Navarre. Despite being 22 loans in debt, I declare war on Tunisia again and annex it. Need... tax... infidels...

- 1501 Ally with His Popeness, maybe the threat of excommunication will keep the Gauls off my back.

- 1505-1515 Lose Savoy Alliance to a forced annulment from France. Try to ally Florence as a future vassal, but it's conquered by France first. Try to ally Bologna as a future vassal but it's vassalized by France first. Try to ally Corsica... and I finally get one.

- 1528 France attacks the Papal State and again I'm in no position to help. I finally pay off my loans. Corsica annexed. Now to wait for corruption (from currency debasement) to decrease.

- 1552 France attacks again, before I can catch up in tech. England just wanders along the French shoreline constantly pulling its armies back before taking even a single province. Game over.

--------------------------

Attempt 2

Try allying France and Castile this time around. Refuse Naples' independence dynastic event, and by some amazing stroke of luck no-one supports its independence. Same with Castilla. So the game now shifts to holding out long enough to integrate my vassals.

1461 Invade Tunis, take northern coast.

1464 France invades Provence. This is the first war it's started, in contrast to its immediate expansion last game.

1490 Genoa conquered by Milan leaving Corsica free to be Vassalized by me, even if it puts me at a diplomatic power penalty. Morocco and Tlemcen ally Ottomans, making them untouchable for the time being.

1492 Begin integrating Napoli, with a fortuitous Nobility Diet quest negating the diplomatic penalty for doing so. Ally Saluzzo and Padua with an eye toward vassalization and annexation. My Diplomatic power income becomes 0 for a couple years.

1495 Integrate Navarre. France Invades Burgundy. England's French provinces still untouched.

1501 Vassalize Aquileia. Grant privileges to the Nobility and Clergy to offset my lengthy and costly subject integrations.

1513 Finish integrating Naples, annex Corsica and Padua, Ally Mantua. Begin the painstaking process of integrating Castille

1529 Ally Ragusa when it breaks away from Hungary. Invade Jolof without casus belli just to get a head start on African expansion.

1544 Expanded farther into Africa via Fulo and Kaabu.

1556 Tlemcen lost its Ottoman defense, so invade it and Morocco.

1569 After 56 years(!) Castile is finally integrated. Ragusa and Aquileia annexed. Mantua Vassalized. Trent allied. Spain formed.

1582 Mop up the remnants of Kaabu

1584 Annex Mantua and Trent, vassalize Savoy which has been pared down to a couple of provinces, though like Saluzzo, I can't annex it for lack of adjacency.

1589 Ally His Popeness and lay a claim on Tuscany in preparation for baiting its ally Milan into a war sometime in the future. However, I am three techs behind, so I wait for the moment and build up my economy. My expansion into western Africa has apparently caused a defensive block to form between Songhai, Hausa and Yao, so no advancing in that direction yet. All in all, the map of Western Europe has remained rather static for the first century and a half.

1594

1601 War against Yatenga to bait its guarantor Hausa out of its other alliances.

1616 France loses its great power status.

1625 Invade Tuscany with Fronse and His Popeness. Milan and others defend. Manage to take Genoa's old provinces plus Pisa, but get coalitioned (but not attacked) by Hungary, Austria and a gaggle of German principalities for my trouble. Rush to ally Bavaria, Magdeburg, Strasburg and Three Leagues in defense. If this breaks out into war it'll wreck the Holy Roman Empire. (Thankfully I had invested some "improve relations" diplomat time just in case something like this happens.

Situation... stable.

1632 At long last I have the adjacency to annex Savoy and Saluzzo.

1649 Bohemia declares independence from Hungary (which controls all of Eastern Europe) with France's support. The coalition against me falls apart, leaving me free to... steer clear of Italy for a while, just in case, and push on into Africa's darkest. The remnants of Hausa give me a back-door war declaration against Songhai.

1653 Britain (along with Austria, Morocco and pretty much all of North America) takes advantage of the recent wars to declare war on France. Unable to abandon my most valuable alliance, I reluctantly accept. Cue loans and mercenaries, being at 0 manpower. On Land, Morocco and I focus each other. At sea though, the indomitable Spanish armada make out like... some kind of sea bandits?

- capturing 40+ vessels. Who rules the waves now, putas? After five years of World War -1, in 1658 I get exactly one province out the whole mess.

1662 The PayPal State (no joke, they're loaded) wants to invade Milan... which is Allied with Hungary and Russia. I'm still paying off debts from the last war and haven't rebuilt my military, so, umm, no. I need to spend some quality time with the fam. They force Milan to free another province from old Savoy, Torino... which it so happens I have a claim on. I also happen to have an army right next door. Thanks? You can have this shroud back though, it's dirty.

1675 Bavaria pulls me back into Italian politics faster than I had wanted with an invasion against The Palatinate and its ally Milan. Luckily, since my Aragonese missions auto-core the Mediterranean coast, the computer conquers provinces in my name. Too bad I can only grab a couple or risk another coalition.

1688 Invade Tuscany with all my allies except France, hoping they'll do most of my fighting for me since I'm behind in military tech. It works gloriously. Grab Parma, force them to release Ferrara for my vassalization pleasure. Grab Tuscany's last two provinces. Whaddaya know Jerry, there really a-was-a house in Toscana! Except Three Leagues, my own ally, sacks my capital after liberating it from a siege. I mean, okay, predictable enough behavior for the 1600s, but still, dude, not cool! I'm gonna make the pope proclaim a bull of not cool!

1690s I want to continue my African expansion, but Magdeburg and then Bavaria keep pulling me into Holy Roman Shit. I don't dare give up their alliances though, as France keeps losing ground to Britain. Zilch on territory gains.

1700 Enlightenment appears... in Hanseong, Korea. Okaaayyy... and here I'd been putting up universities in a hurry to rush it for once.

1708 Finally annex Ferrara during a lull in the wars.

1716 France revolts and breaks all its alliances. After all that?!? Swap in Utrecht as my new ally. Buy Enlightenment, tech up to 25 and invade Songhai. Yes, I'm aware of the enlightened irony, but it's now or never. Given I'd forgotten to upgrade my forts (and they hadn't) it turns into a nasty war of attrition lasting until '23.

Mean 250k-strong peasant rebellions after the war too. Yes, multiple ones.

1729 Magdeburg (now Saxony) and Bavaria keep dragging me into wars for their own expansion when what I'd like to do is rebuild my military for a strike on a now weakened France fighting off counter-revolutionary attacks. At least I'm rich enough to keep some mercenaries on my payroll permanently. By the time I finish a time-consuming invasion of Bohemia (ruining my relation with them) just so Saxony can annex one stinkin' province, my window for moving on France has closed. And all because of Freakin' Pomerania once again, I swear, what is your major malfunction, Rostock?

1739 Britain hits France again, creating... maybe... an opportunity? Three Leagues joins the revolution and breaks alliance... but not before pulling me into a war against Switzerland causing Hungary to jump in as well, so once again I can't afford to capitalize on France's troubles.

Grab Utrecht as replacement ally. And then Strasbourg calls me into another war against Baden. Saxony breaks its alliance to also join the Three Leagues war against me. Freakin' Pomerania! Ally Bohemia. Utrecht breaks its alliance as well to join in this piddling little war that has almost cost me the game by this point, because by 1743 anti-war revolts are already starting to break out. I pay 6800+ ducats just to get out of the damn quagmire. Re-ally Utrecht and (against my better judgment) Freakin' Pomerania.

1750 Bohemia breaks its alliance to stick by France, after I'd tried buttering them up to break up the bloc. Fine, be that way. Still giving me no chance to move against France, the Turks invade me. (And I was aready fighting Otto-mans up North!) I let my allies handle the Eastern front (about time they made themselves useful) and focus on knocking Morocco and Hausa out early, before going head-on against a solid million janissaries. Again the Spanish armada triumphs, capturing 57 ships in a single battle. And a big thank you to all the West-Africans rebelling against me only to whittle down Ottoman armies instead. Herzegovina changes hands about six? seven? times over five years (man, they just cannot catch a break over there) and by '55 I settle for grabbing the Barbary Coast from Morocco then just some cash to wrap things up before allies bail and attrition and rebellions lose this for me. Phew. Close one.

1757 Strasbourg gets vassalized by Hungary when I'm not looking. Ally Austria as replacement. Saxony and Bavaria spend the next few years mopping up revolutionary statelets in the HRE. Now if only someone would distract Fronse long enough for me to snag that southern border... in '59 the Brits decide to do just that, let's see how it goes.

1761 Finish Offensive Ideas for that +5 discipline bonus, grab the Horse Artillery policy (+10% artillery power) proclaim my golden age for a morale bonus, take a deep breath and (even though I'm below half my manpower reserves) invade France. Crush the revolution! Scatter the peasant scum! (capture a bit of real estate while we're at it) for our rightful ancestral rightness of rights!

They can't possibly beat all this... can they?

Complicating matters, my ally Utrecht ends up on the other side of the conflict through a different war, and the bellicose gauls tech up to military level 28 two years before I can. Luckily they spend their initial efforts on the Brits as planned and I manage to hold the southern half of their territory, and the Bavarians hold off their Bohemian allies.

Paris falls in March '63, by '64 Bavaria already throws in the towel, so I cut things off at a 48-point peace offer. (Ooopsie, guess I forgot to crush the revolution. That might still kill me if the Brits don't pick up the slack.)

1779 I'd love to keep expanding into Africa, but with its alliance busy against Russia the past couple of years, I doubt I'll get a better chance at France before the game ends. This time I trounce 'em. Aaand it might get me coalitioned, but what the hey, let's capture gay gris Paris. Weirdly, that somehow still does not crush the revolution.

1785 Yet another invasion of the bicentennial Songhai/Morocco/Yao alliance. Gimme. Annex the first, nibble a bit from the others. Most African nations now coalition against me (but don't attack) and y'know, I kinda can't blame 'em. Ten years later, that coalition against me is... still growing? With the Ottomans and France?

1809 Coalition finally disbands.

1811 My golden age expires. For a last hurrah, invade Milan. Hungary and Frronse defend, Bavaria, Austria, Utrecht and His Popeness help me. (The Saxons are conveniently busy fighting the Turks. Freakin' Pomerania. I. Swear!) Knock France out by '15, Hungary by '17, wait until 1820/01/01 to annex Milan due to the inevitable coalition that will this time certainly declare war against me.

Caribbean inherited from Castilla. Not pictured: Greenland.

Conclusions?

1) Unlike my other playthroughs, this campaign had two distinct phases. Until the early-mid 1500s I sank massive amounts of diplomatic power into peaceful annexation, aided by Aragon's quite generous scripted events. With that firm economic base you can move on to forceful expansion afterward.

2) Weirdly, allying France put the brakes on its expansion far more surely than opposing it. It declared war less often, never incorporated its British holdings and fought to a draw with the HRE while rarely calling me in - for fear I'd take half its victims' lunch money or what?

3) Even weirder is how safe Portugal has been in every single playthrough so far. The only one positioned to snatch it up at first is Castile, which has a more immediate problem with Morocco. And that's only if its English alliance gets weakened somehow. After it inevitably balloons into a colonial empire, Portugal's just more trouble than it's worth for its moderate province yield.

4) A Spanish run is Hardcore Catholic. I'd never gotten into it before, but Papal Influence kinda rocks. Sure, the bonuses aren't huge for their lengthy accrual, but they cover areas otherwise hard to address, especially during the early game, like inflation or construction cost. The stability recovery alone saved me well over a thousand administrative power. And the south gives you oh-so-many Muslim provinces to convert for Popery Points.

5) Opposite of Prussia's very high army professionalism, I depended heavily on mercenaries, and thus repeatedly shrugged off initial military losses, winning mostly by attrition. I only noticed when the Economic Hegemon title became available that it includes merc bonuses, so this appears very much by design. Naval power plays into this as well, but I'll address that as an intro to my next post.

6) The Revolution mechanic's weird. I'd assumed capturing the epicenter of the movement (Paris) would allow me to... y'know, DO SOMETHING about it, domestically, but instead it just sits there at 100% completion spawning endless revolts. So the only option to take it down is to declare war with that singular purpose while the center remains foreign. Not the most elegant or nuanced way of handling such a world-changing event. Granted, Revolutionary France really did get dogpiled in real life, but still...

7) Too much of EU4 revolves around gaming the alliance system for ridiculous back-door war declarations denying your enemies their more lucrative allies, especially as your victims' remaining friends rarely take advantage of existing wars, and the coalition system can itself be gamed, if anything, more easily by big empires attacking different geographic regions than by medium-sized nations which must expand in a single region. See my alternating Europe/Africa expansion, and I'm not even good at it. My main gripe remains; the game's designed to favor the big dogs for high score dick-measuring.

8) Computer opponents' insane military strategy prevents Europa Universalis from really standing against other competitors purely as a war game. (Though it more than compensates in other aspects.) Most strikingly, the AI is obsessed with hitting your farthest provinces. It will entirely forego defense for that purpose. While, yes, hitting your soft spot can weaken your economic backing for the war and force you to split your forces, it more often splits the enemy forces even worse, as it usually means longer travel time for them when you can take the shortcut.

Prime example:

Taking the Ragusa and Herzegovina provinces in 1529 made them my best military asset by far, pound for pound, as in every single war the AI prioritized and over-invested in conquering them as a weak spot I'd be unable to protect. Yeah. And also unwilling, uncaring and uninterested to protect. Hungary, the Ottomans, Milan, Bohemia, all of them spent years and armies trudging around the Adriatric while I focused far more important objectives and established a solid, contiguous front line. Moreover, since my allies shared the same obsession, it resulted in a hilarious back-and-forth as the fortress got taken, re-taken, un-taken, tooken, tokened and Tookished half a dozen times during a couple of the lengthier engagements.

But hey, I guess we can call that an apt illustration of the region's history.

I'm sure my hordes of attentive readers are eagerly awaiting a cactus update. It is a tale of stalwart endurance, moral failing and sabotage most devious. Bought back in 2017, it rapidly outgrew its seedling pot, and by 2018 was cozily residing on a windowsill in a palm-sized replacement mixed with aquarium gravel for drainage.

(The seedling pot was present but shall not be visible as an aquarium decoration in an upcoming snail saga.)

By the start of 2021 it was visibly failing to thrive.

Its roots however had developed quite well, so once re-re-potted by its lazy slob of a wolfman caretaker, it started piling upwards and outwards.

2023

Sadly when it came time to re-re-re-pot the silly thing again this year (that lightweight, peat mossy cactus potting mix stuff had settled so badly that the pot's rim was cutting off its light) I allowed myself to be badgered by a self-appointed expert into sticking a fertilizer stick into its soil against my voiced protests, which promptly poisoned it to death.

May 2025. R.I.P.

So, strangely, though I joked about this "life affirming symbol of continuity" possibly dying as an extension of my own suicidal depression seven years ago, its demise instead ultimately demonstrated that my own marginal competence is still better than letting a busybody interfere.

 

You know who you are.

Like It, Take That

There's quite a bit of hub-bub nowadays about the U.S. government's use of military troops in harassing cities which dared vote against the presidunce last year. We might talk about that soon-ish. For now, consider what you'll do once the rich no longer need troops.

 

Scattered among the general hype about chat-bots these past few years you'll find the occasional item of valid concern, like tech bros making auto-targeting machine guns. Current A"I" in no way creates, only copies from a myriad sources at once, which is how it sounds so right when you ask it a question: matching your phrasing to a probabilistic follow-up you expect to hear based on internet chatter. But that also implies rapid advancement in fields which already exploded after decades of laughable failure, which is to say, again, matching. Of any kind. Aerial object tracking, face recognition, voice recognition, eye recognition. When they say they're making guns to auto-target drones, you cannot be so unbearably stupid not to read the inevitable next step every tyranny dreams: auto-targeting every single one of its peasants. How many gimbaled sniper rifles will it take to blanket every street in Chicago or Portland? In London? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? The cameras are already in place. No delay while troops are flown in, no messy relay of orders, no chance of principled mutiny. No need for the government, really. Fifty milliseconds after Bezos decides he doesn't like you, your head simply explodes from a kilometer away.

 

The biggest risk to every Caesar has always been his own generals, his own personal guard. Well, after his own children of course. Once you no longer need a million fingers for a million triggers... The military has always been a necessary evil. Once it is no longer necessary, it will be all the more evil. But how will they get you to go along with that?

 

Over the past couple of decades, algorithmic content delivery has proven increasingly adept at creating cults, fueling echo chambers. This has largely exploited our instinctive need for in-group belonging, for the approval of a wider social milieu. "Like" buttons, Steam achievements, thumbs up, forum comments, they've all mostly still required some degree of horizontal information transfer, some other voices (honest or not) willing to chime in with your insanity. With functional chat-bots, the methodology shifts away from "communities" and toward an individual touch.

 

There's a mental disease I've mentioned before in passing and which crops up in entertainment now and then, folie a deux, shared delusion. Commonly a dominant personality with an existing obsession has it pandered to and reinforced by a more gullible which takes on the delusion by contagion. As this tends to require high initial confidence and years of constant interaction with little or no outside interference to tell you you've started talking crazy, it's always been just a rare oddity limited to a few close relationships between family members or, on the ironic end, a danger to shrinks with charismatic patients. But now, you can get a consenting opinion you keep in your pocket. Picking up topics by contagion, regardless of realism, is the very definition of a chatbot's function. And it is quite literally dependent on you, much like a needy spouse or sibling you need to protect. You charge its battery, keep it patched, presumably buy it some in-app Scooby Snacks or whatever. No-one need hear everything it whispers to you, the absurdities you need validated, every night, month after month, year after year, always agreeable, always supportive, always incapable of discerning reality from fantasy.

 

Well, except in one important respect. While these bots' creators have proven incapable of making them tell the truth, the very process of whittling down an infinity of data to coherence implies an inherent potential for channeling their output away from certain topics unpleasant to vested interests. You might say the product is simply not 100% reliable... but it need not be, only skew hard enough, flatter hard enough, validate hard enough to shift a few percentages at the polls. The more the process is refined, the better they'll get at steering your conversation away from a few choice concerns. So if you complain that your next-door neighbor's head just got drilled with a .50-caliber round from the skyscraper down the street, your closest companion will be right there, soothing your worries, allaying your fears, telling you it's okay to be scared, but it's all for the best. After all, it's no crime to install a home defense system, and Oprah Winfrey has every right to call Chicago or Milwaukee her home town. So let's talk again about how amazingly original your idea for a story about a plucky small-town lad who slays a dragon sounds and how delicious your frozen pizza was when it came out of the oven, and what a great conversationalist you are, yes you, who's great, you are! And its okay to be worried about the national guard marching outside your door, that's very smart of you but it's really nothing big, just don't forget to heil the prophet five times a day and praise His heliochromatic coiffure.

 

It may seem worrisome to think we're already headed for a third of the population developing an endless, individually-tailored, paradoxically one-sided variety of folies a deux. Don't worry, though. The next patch will address... most of those varieties. The inconvenient ones. By someone's definition.

 

Automated, targeted insanity. Love the bomb.

Why did she forgive her date for not popping a breath mint?

He was found non chompos mentos. 

Slayers of Fear

"Stelllaaaaaaaa!"

- one of the most parodied moments in all theater, yet still more dignified than this

 

My recent disappointment with Metro 2033 as a Hollywood-envious cinematic adventure light on actual gameplay drew my mind to several years later when "walking simulator" became an unofficial, then semi-official genre unto itself. Layers of Fear was among the earliest titles I remember explicitly described (and not merely insulted) as one and thus thought it a fitting measure of the style's potential. As such, it offers few elements to even analyze. Scant puzzles rely too much on red herrings or an unforeshadowed memory test. Weirdly, the last act, instead of building toward a finale, mires you in the stupidest adventure game trope of pixel-hunting for checkers pieces. You can easily ask yourself:

A bit on the nose, don't you think?

After turning off the exagerrated head bob effect making my character seem drunk off his ass (perhaps not accidentally but still very annoyingly) abundant electricity but a lack of electronics places the action sometime during the mid-20th century. (On a personal note, the decor was sometimes eerily reminiscent of my godparents' apartment building.) I must admit I giggled a bit at the thought of GenZers boggling at sight of a rotary phone, but aside from that the timeframe lacks relevance. Literary merit: variable, but mostly absent. Suffice to say the script's written by art majors -

- who think the fedora era emoted missives like Facebook addicts, though they do put more effort into some of the more official correspondence. They fare far better on visuals, with many of the individual scenes and props meriting applause.

A little while later:

Scene by scene, if you were to cut the game into ten-second increments, they're even put to solid use. Interactivity may have its drawbacks, but it offers a major advantage over more passive media in making the user inherently complicit to the action. Your every click, after all, can open the door to the next scene, demolish a building, doom or save an NPC. On a small scale, Layers of Fear displays a thorough grasp of this principle. You have no guns to shoot, no spells to cast, cannot even jump. But reading a leaflet, taking a step, even just turning your camera, can warp and disfigure your environment.

Too bad it just doesn't hold up.

 

Such gimmicks were not new in 2016, but though they'd proven effective (e.g. The Secret World) here they sour through overuse and lack of contrast. I once pointed out that the goofiness of Bloodlines' Malkavian playthrough would grow monotonous had it been predictable and constant, if it did not mingle with the mundane for counterpoint. Layers of Fear proves me right.

 

For one, the imagery is too random to add up to anything. For another, it makes naive use of some pretty tired tropes. Paintings with bleeding eyes? Seen it. And yes, if there's an elevator in a horror show, of course it has to fall at some point. Jump scares and interface screw work well when the player is distracted by working on some other task; here, your only task is to keep walking in circles triggering the next jump scare, so there's no surprise, no tension, no stakes. Similarly, the environments and props melting into each other would feel disconcerting, if there was anything they were supposed to be in the first place, but when everything's surreal it does indeed induce what Robert Sheckley coined in Mindswap as Panzaism* - a blase acceptance of the new reality, seeing the fantastic as ordinary in reverse of Quixotism. By your first hour you begin anticipating the changes so reliably that it feels like clicking through a user license agreement, flipping pages as fast as you can to reach the "next" button instead of appreciating the content.**

First off, as you might guess, that pretty much kills the traditional boogeyman horror element. Briefly at the start, hints of some demonic, rodential force made it sound like an adaptation of Pickman's Model (couldn't've turned out worse than Netflix' maladaptation) but we soon focus entirely on the protagonist's personal life. So it might still have retained psychological horror, existential dread, guilt and penance and all that jazz, but once again Layers simply lays it on so damn thick as to veer into farce. There was a point, halfway through, when I dared hope it would do for delirium tremens what The Cat Lady did for for depression, but (and I will be spoiling a bit) it pins its hopes on a far more socially acceptable routine: bashing men.

 

From the start you know some terrible event happened, and the man has to be guilty so you probably caused it somehow. Of course you're a terrible husband, but it piles on so redundantly as to lose its effect. You're a drunk, you're a workaholic, you stood her up, you made false promises, you argued loudly with her, you bought the wrong housepet, you were late for your kid's birthday, you drew scary children's book illustrations, you no longer found her sexually attractive after her accident, you broke paintbrushes, you bought too many toy dolls, you insulted salesmen, you argued with the dog, you let the kid read the label on your liquor bottle, you forgot to shop for apples, etceteree, etceterah. Even the two brief moments showing the wife lashing out get framed exhaustively and explicitly as being driven to it by the evil, evil man. Honestly, whenever I walked into a bathroom I began expecting to be upbraided at leaving the toilet seat up, having exhausted most other reservoirs of marital vitriol. It quickly becomes obvious that the entire plot of a descent into madness was written around the pretextual need for the male to be wrong in as many ways as possible. Even the obsession with vermin goes nowhere, serving no purpose but to glob on more disgust by association.

 

I would be curious to test all the critics who gushed praise at Layers of Fear with a gender-swapped version of the same plot and see if they're as willing to overlook its odd feat of redundant incoherence, absent the misandrist conceit. Such repetitive and utterly one-sided characterization might have worked for half, maybe one hour at the outmost, but after four or five laser-focused non-stop hours? Boredom. Just... boredom.

 

Even if you like the notion of a walking simulator, you must admit there's not much point in one that only works for ten paces at a time.

 

 

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* Political commentary not intended... but acknowledged.

** Political commentary... well, yes, again

P.S.: There is one utterly brilliant moment, late in the game, when you walk past an open window and see your only glimpse of the outdoors, night-time, a small patch of greenery walled off between buildings, calm and sane... and the window slams shut in your face, excluding you from nature and sanity. A smidge more counterpoint like that would have done wonders.