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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Let me explain it by way of analogy.

One of my favorite board games is Commands & Colors: Ancients. I've played it well over 100 times. It's hook is that it takes your typical hex and counter conflict simulator, and encodes the combat results table into custom dice. Then it has some extra rules for things like support, evasion, leaders, and then a fuck ton of cruft around how elephants work on the battlefield.

There is tons of light cavalry in this game. My understanding is that light cavalry in the ancient world were attackers of opportunity. Ride down the weak and injured. Flank the enemy. Stuff like that. These are literally just unarmored dudes on horses. These are not the heavily armored medieval knights that Hollywood has cemented in our consciousness as synonymous with cavalry.

I played probably 30 games in a row with a guy who simply could not dismiss the Hollywood version of cavalry from his consciousness when playing this game. Every, single time he plowed his light cavalry directly into my heavy infantry. Every time. No matter how many times I showed him the statistics behind these light cavalry, Hollywood had just brainwashed him into thinking they were heavily armored knights. No matter how many times they got cut to ribbons in scenario after scenario after scenario, he was just incapable of noticing.

The statistics, the personal experience, all of it glided off his smooth brain because he had no narrative to help contextualize it.

One of my favorite board games is Commands & Colors: Ancients.

Stop trying to make me like you.

Sorry, still don't get what this has to do with my question. What do you think is being hidden and from whom?

I think the point of the anecdote was that "people will believe all sorts of misconceptions because they saw it on TV or in a movie; black criminality is no different, as the way the media handles it has implanted the context of 'black people are never at fault for anything' in most people's heads." Whether or not that's true, it's hard to say.

For my money, I'd say that the Internet is pretty good at exposing and debunking things that only happen in movies (WRT guns, physics, security...basically anything that would have serious ramifications for one's continued existence in the real world), one Tumblr post or YouTube video at a time.

Hexes, not freeform positions measured with rulers? Special dice instead of booklets of results tables? Sounds like some sort of children's card game.

Hollywood brainwashing is painfully powerful, I've had instances where I know the factual details of a historical event, read several first-hand accounts then watch a movie about it and have to constantly, conscientiously consciously correct away from made-up details that the lizard brain "remembers" having seen and emotionally knows to be true. "It's like writing history with lightning."

In D&D a long time ago, I mentioned that you could estimate the time by using the width of your fingers to measure the distance between the sun and the horizon. My friends pooh-poohed this and mentioned it for years as an example of me being stupid and believing in dumb shit.

Until Johnny Depp did it in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Then they accepted that it was real. No amount of me googling it, finding good sources or even literally doing it so they could see it was real would help. They had to see Johnny Depp do it.

Welp, that's enough blackpills for me today, gdi

That game sounds great. How heavy would you say it is? Estimated time to play a simple scenario?

It takes more than an hour, but less than 90 minutes usually. It has 24 pages of wargame rules. But it's a lot of half page illustrations and reference material. Still, if all you've played is Catan, it's gonna be a doozy. I think it's a good entry level consim, if that's your cup of tea. But many people think it might be, go and try to read the rules for their first consim, and nope out after the first 3 pages spend defining all the terms the manual uses. All that said, I think the rulebook for Commands & Colors: Ancients is excellently written, and the first few scenarios have almost no terrain, and no units with wonky special rules.

My favorite games are Twilight Imperium and, recently, Hansa Teutonica. Before I tried the latter Brass: Birmingham had that spot. I don’t mind a dense rule book, but it’s a harder sell to get my friends excited about it!

I’ll check it out.

Maybe try luring them in with Rex for a slightly simplified version of Dune with the Twilight Imperium IP on top. Then you can entice them into a TI3:Shards of the Throne game using the Fall of the Empire scenario.

TI4 seems superior based on few games I played

Is

TI3:Shards of the Throne game using the Fall of the Empire scenario

having something to recommend it? Is it redoable in TI4?

TI4 is generally better as a game but doesn't have quite the same road map. I'm more familiar with TI3 and have the full set of expansions. The Fall of the Empire scenario specifically is a variant with a playable Lazax faction starting with control of Mecatol Rex with a surplus of military power, reduced political power and the objective card win conditions shape the play pretty close to the lore. You can jump from Rex to TI4 but it is slightly less clean of a lore integration. The scenario cannot be replicated in TI4 without significant homebrew because of how dependent it is on the combination of treaty mechanics, the Lazax faction tuning and the objective cards.

The scenario itself is a very natural follow-up to Rex which is the Dune board game rules with various factions fighting on the ground to control Mecatol Rex while instead of the storm from Dune it has a fleet moving around bombarding locations. The mechanics, lore, diplomatic backstabbing and approachability of Rex (compared to Dune or TI proper but definitely still a barrier) seem like an easier sell the TI itself. I haven't played the Galeforce 9 Dune version and while the Avalon Hill one is well loved it has known issues and takes a long time. Rex from my perspective was a better game for the time, matches the TI lore theming pretty well for a barely modified reskin that mostly streamlines some mechanics (made the physical board actually being usable, still not a fan even of the GF9 version but then again Rex's board while usable is very bland) and can be played with fewer players and makes it shorter by an hour or so.

In both Rex and TI3: Fall of the Empire the Lazax naturally fall into a position where you can have an experienced player handling their more complex, initially overpowered position (offset by actual win conditions) acting as a sort of DM playing the BBEG on the board.

Yeah, you'll probably be fine. Wargame rulebooks are just... different though. They read more like laws, with sections, subsections, sub-subsection, everything enumerated. Rules will often refer to other rules or sections with simple notation like [Section 2] or [Rule 3.2.1]. Once you get over the learning curve behind how different consim rulebooks are written, they aren't so bad. I find a 24 page rulebook is about the limit of the complexity I can handle. Especially since most of them break down into maybe 12 pages of actual rules, and 12 of illustrations and reference. And among those 12 pages of rules, there are probably 8 you'll encounter regularly and 4 that are just cruft bolted on to try to force some historical flavor.

I've played probably 250 games of Axis & Allies over the years and 249 of them were with my buddy Jimmy. And the one that wasn't just him actually involved him as it was a Christmas present from someone's mom. Dude killed himself last year and I haven't played a game since and I'm really itching to play.

I don't think I even like board games, I think I just enjoy Axis & Allies. However, maybe I don't even like AA, maybe I just enjoyed hanging out with him?

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