When I was at MicroProse, Sid Meier ran an after hours game that worked like this. We all stayed in our offices, which had terrific intercoms. Sid & a pal were the referees. The rest of us were officers in either NATO or the Warsaw Pact in a division- level action in the Fulda Gap.

Higher commanders had to use the com to tell their underlings what to do. The underlings actually did things, and the refs gave them results or information.
1/ So I would order my cavalry squadron LTC to check out a hill I saw on the map, and then Sid told the squadron what they saw, and the LTC would get back to me with something like, “There’s a whole regiment of T-80s! We’re taking heavy fire, 4 Bradleys KOed, pulling back!” Then I’d have to figure my next action.

Meanwhile the Soviet player with the tank regiment was alerted he’d been spotted by ground units.

You may ask, “what about air recon?” Well, the opening of the battle was about a thousand Scuds hitting our airfields (props to the Russian player for thinking of this).

We still had helicopters but they were busy elsewhere. Also the Scud strike at least meant the Pact didn’t have any more to hit our command posts.
2/

I've posted this before, but why not again?

In 1997, I was the lead designer of Ensemble's next cool IP - "Sorceress", which was a magic-based real time strategy game. We'd moved quite a way along it. We had elves being produced from tree groves, wraiths created by transforming corpses, and so forth. It was rapidly becoming a whole game. But Age of Empires 2 was happening at the same time, and Ensemble Studios wasn't that big.

So every week, the management would come to me and say something like, "We need Don to switch over to Age 2. That's okay, right?" Well I'm a team player so sure take Don. But the hits kept coming. By January or February, ALL BUT TWO members of my team had been poached for Age 2. All I had left was me, a top programmer, and a top artist.

So I went to the company's suits, and said, "There's no way I can create an entire new RTS with three people. But I have a suggestion. When I was working on roleplaying games back at Chaosium, we found that each expansion sold something like 25%-35% as many copies as the original. If that holds true for RTS games, we could put together an expansion for Age of Empires on the cheap, taking only a few months, and a tiny team. If the expansion sold even 10% as well as Age, we'd make a mint."
1/ The management agreed - unlike many company "suits" they were smart, game-savvy, and forward-thinking. I then presented my core idea for the expansion: "After the ancient times, Rome took over. Rome's cool and pretty sexy. Let's base the expansion on Rome. We'll add Rome and three other civilizations, all enemies of Rome, like Carthage for example. We can also fix little balance problems that have come up since Age was published. Everyone will want the expansion for the new civs at a minimum."

Now my bosses were pretty excited. When they presented the idea to MicroSoft, the morons in Redmond poured ice water.

"Our experience has shown that game expansions don't sell."

But Ensemble's management already had fallen in love with Rise of Rome, and as I'd pointed out, it was a cheap experiment. So we went ahead without MicroSoft's approval (at this time, they hadn't yet bought Ensemble). Also, I think the goons at MicroSoft thought the expansion would just be a bunch of campaigns and scenarios. While scenarios would definitely be included, my vision was that it would contain something for everybody. New units, new technologies, AND new civs.

Even if you only ever wanted to play Hittites, say, you'd want Rise of Rome because it adds Slingers, Camel Riders, Fire Galleys, Scythe Chariots, Logistics, Martyrdom, Medicine, and the Tower Shield to your civ. The Tower Shield is particularly useful because Hittites rely heavily on archers.

And if you wanted to experiment with some of the new civs ... well then, the world was your oyster.
2/

Naysayers and party-poopers are always trying to explain to me why giant bugs can't exist. "Well akshually" they say. Well, I've spent a LOT of time studying insects and I WANT GIANT BUGS. Don't you?

So let's talk about how to make this happen. First off, giant arthropods have existed before. The best-known are Arthropleura (land) and eurypterids (sea), both of which got to about 10 feet long. But they're not elephant sized yet, so let's keep hammering at it.
1/ One of the most common reasons is because insects breathe via spiracles, which rely partly on tissue diffusion, which only is useful up to about 3 inches, which limits a spiracle-reliant creature to a width of about 6 inches.

However, there are arthropods which use lungs - scorpions & spiders. And ocean-dwellers don't use spiracles (they use gills). But even if we only discuss insects, these creatures have shown incredible adaptive powers. I am sure they could evolve an enhancement for their spiracles if they needed it. Perhaps a pump system to move air deeper for the spiracles. They already have it to an extent - many larger insects use muscle movements to aid breathing - look at how a grasshopper or wasp pulsate.

We still need another auxiliary system for a huge insect. But since insects have evolved cast systems, metamorphosis, hyperparasitism, and flight, I think they could figure this one out.
2/

How to balance unbalanced factions in a game.

I cut my teeth making Age of Empires' factions asymmetrical yet balanced. The most fun I ever had was developing Age of Empires III: The Warchiefs, which were also the very most unbalanced factions we'd ever created. I carried this love for asymmetry on after Ensemble Studios went kaput.

My game Cthulhu Wars is famously asymmetrical. (It's available on shop dot petersengames dot com, Noble Knight, and elsewhere.) The factions have different abilities, spellbooks, ways to win, and even monsters. Cthulhu has shoggoths, starspawn, & deep ones. Black Goat has dark young, mi-go, and ghouls. They don't even get Elder Signs the same way.

This gives the game a lot more replayability, because if you've mastered the tactics & strategy of, say, Cthulhu, but now ecide to play he Crawling Chaos

1/ The first step (for me) is to sketch out how the factions differ. In Cthulhu Wars, Cthulhu is the apex predator. Black Goat works more like a fungus infection - it can't really deliver a knockout blow, but it's really hard to eradicate. Crawling Chaos is a vulture - it preys on the vulnerable, strikes from surprise, and exploits every weakness mercilessly. And so forth.

So I gave Cthulhu units that help maximize battle power. Crawling Chaos got units that help him avoid the consequences of his actions - the hunting horrors fly out of nowhere to bolster his troops when ambushed. The flying polyps let him choose a unit to keep out of a fight. The nightgaunts let him abduct an enemy unit, removing it from the battle.

And the spellbook requirements also support this by encouraging the faction to do what he does best. Cthulhu wants to go into battle. Black Goat wants to spread out across the map. Yellow Sign wants to wander on his crazy pilgrimage around the world. And so forth.

This of course doesn't help balance the factions, but it gives me a sound basis for knowing WHAT I want the factions to do, and supporting that. I don't want to lose sight of the faction's vision.
[pic from Viktor Eikman] 2/

In 1999, my task at Ensemble Studios was lead designer for an expansion pack to Age of Empires 2. The previous expansion had been Rise of Rome, which made sense, because Rome followed the various older nations featured in Age of Empires 1. But there wasn’t any obvious super-nation after the middle ages, so we went with the generic “The Conquerors” as our theme. So naturally we wanted conqueror civs. Rise of Rome had 4 civs, so that’s how many we wanted - I chose the Huns, the Spanish, the Mayans and the Aztecs. I was super-excited to finally get Aztecs into a game. (And I don’t need any of you whippersnapper mansplaining to me that the Aztecs were bad guys. Buddy, I put them in the game BECAUSE they were bad guys.)

Anyway, The Conquerors project went super-smooth. Five weeks AHEAD of schedule, we were almost complete – almost unheard of in a software project. I was proud. The whole team was excited because now we’d be moving onto Age of Mythology or Age of Empires 3. So non-stop gaming development.

Then Microsoft called.
1/ Over the phone, in a big conference call in the company bar (yes we had one), the Microsoft goons said, “We need you to add Koreans to the Conquerors.”

Me; “Koreans, to their credit, didn’t conquer their neighbors. Nothing wrong with them, but they don’t fit the theme of The Conquerors.”

Microsoft goons (I don’t know why it took a whole team of them to talk over the conference call, but it did): “Starcraft sold 3 million copies in Korea.”

Me: “Starcraft doesn’t have Koreans, so that’s not why.”

Microsoft: “But Starcraft sold 3 MILLION copies in Korea.”

So yeah. I thought my counter-argument was pretty good, but when someone simply repeats a previous argument, they are no longer functioning on logic or intelligence. That’s a Pro Tip by the way – if you’re having a discussion and they repeat themselves you’re done. I knew MS would keep pushing this no matter what. To make my life easier, I agreed right away. I asked if we could have extra time to add a WHOLE NEW CIVILIZATION. “What? Of course not.” On the other hand I felt an obligation to try to get it done ASAP for my team, who were itching for a new project.
2/

How I created the Mayans for Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors. First off, I created them basically so the new building set for the Aztecs would be useful with more than a single civ. I didn't want the Mayans to have gunpowder or horses, so they needed some way to make themselves useful.

The Aztecs were already going to be the warrior tough-guy civ, so the Mayans needed to be a economic civ.

First off I created the Eagle Warrior to be the horse-substitute for both Mayans & Aztecs. This is a fast unit with a distinctive look (so you can tell it's not the same as other infantry). It's not as fast as cavalry, though so people with horses can still think they're cool. On the other hand, the eagle warrior isn't cavalry, so it gets infantry upgrades & isn't weak against pikes.

Eagle Warriors didn't have as much hit points as cavalry (since they're infantry) so I gave them a slight bonus against cavalry to help them compete one-on-one. They're a solid unit, which can be the backbone of your battle plan, but also which you can ignore if you have a better plan.

To replace the mounted Scout from other civs, I gave both Aztecs & Mayans a starting Eagle Warrior, which also had the side benefit of making them a little scary in the early age.
1/ But the Eagle Warrior, cool as it was, was shared between Aztec & Mayan so didn't make them distinctive. Because the Aztecs were so famous for their awesome infantry, I decided to boost the eagle warriors a bit for Mayans, and gave the Mayans a special tech which almost doubles the eagle's hit points. Ouch. The Aztec eagle warriors can still compete, because of the Aztec infantry edge (faster training & higher attack). So Aztec vs. Mayan eagles is almost a wash, but the Mayan eagles last a LOT longer against the Europeans.

Now that was taken care of, I decided to focus on archers for the Mayan main weapon. I had their archers be cheaper in the various ages AND their unique unit - the Plumed Archer - was one of the most interesting archers in the game. It was really hard to kill, for an archer, but had a weak attack. This made it able to kill things that are vulnerable to archers while it could last a long time against counter-archers.

I also chose to make Mayan skirmishers NOT be cheaper - so they were comparatively worse than their archers. The intent here was that they had good archers & eagle runners, and shouldn't rely on skirms. I hate civs that can do "everything" and didn't want the Mayans to be one of these.

Also I knew someone would complain about the fact that Mayans get access to crossbowmen. Tough. We're not going to make another whole new unit with identical stats to the European crossbow just for some kind of fake historical verisimilitude. Remember - our whole team was less than a 10th the size of Age 2. We had to pick and choose our battles.

Below are plumed archers from the Definitive edition which I think look cool except for their comically long and impossible feathers (can't think of a single bird besides Ostriches with plumes that big).
2/

What's the absolute worst job in digital gaming? Well I've been out of that business since 2012, but unless things have changed a lot, it's "playtester". I know teenagers all think being a tester is a dream job. Get paid to sit around all day playing games?! Woot!

Well, it's not like that. And here are five reasons why you don't want to be a tester. (At the end I give two reasons why you might actually WANT to be a tester.)

Reason One - you get the least respect in the company. You are the lowest tier of the organization. You're not part of any team, but just an adjunct, glued onto the team for specific purposes. You're not an artist, coder, designer, or producer, and everyone secretly knows anyone could do your job, so you're viewed skill-wise as about on a par with a day laborer.
1/ Reason Two - in any kind of company stress, it's the playtesters who get fired first. You don't want to fire designers, programmers, or artists, obviously. But playtesters? Hell, in a pinch you can get the designers, programmers, and artists to playtest FOR you. And in fact, they're doubtless doing it already. They'll just need to up their game during these tough times. So as a tester you have zero job security.

Reason Three - the work is deadly dull. You're not getting to play the awesome AAA games the company is known for. I mean you are, kind of, but you're playing the buggiest, most broken version of it. And the tasks you're set are like, "Play a real game, but near the end you need to get 100,000 arrows in the air at once so we can see if it crashes the game" This is a real task they were set to do on Age of Empires 2. Even better, we found that it only crashes the game about 7% of the time, so they had to get 100,000 arrows in the air after a half hour of play only to find it didn't reproduce the bug 14 times out of 15 and they had to try again.

The art is crappy pre-release art. The adventures aren't finished. The civilizations and units aren't balanced. The game is literally the worst it's ever going to be, and that's what you're playing. And when the game FINALLY starts to get good, it is finished, and you're moved onto another terrible buggy game.
2/

Here's why dinosaurs would be a real problem for us today if they got loose. Note that the following facts are not what was emphasized in the Jurassic Park movies. Dinosaurs have a completely different ecology from large mammals.
Mammals in general, particularly large mammals, are what we call K strategists. They breed quite slowly but have intensive parental care and live a long time. Take a hippo for example - it only has 1 baby at a time, usually every other year. But imagine trying to get to that hippo calf to eat it!! Once it grows up, that hippo lives 40-50 years. We think of this as the "normal" situation, because it's what we are too - we are in a sense the ultimate K strategist in nature.
1/ Now those of you with some ecology training will be remembering the existence of r-strategists. These focus on having lots of babies, like houseflies, possums, or dandelions. Many r-strategists (like houseflies or possums) also have extremely short lifespans. The idea behind an r-strategist is that it has SO MANY BABIES that some of them are sure to survive.

But dinosaurs followed a pattern which is not so widespread today. They had LOTS of babies, but also had some parental care. For instance, they have found the skeleton of an oviraptor guarding a nest of 24 eggs. Now, an oviraptor is in between the size of a modern coyote or wolf. Assuming (as is likely) that like most egg-layers, oviraptors had 1 clutch yearly, this means that an oviraptor had up to 24 kids a year. Compare to a coyote or wolf, which typically has 4-7 pups in a year. The oviraptor is reproducing four times faster.
Even worse, this applies to larger dinosaurs. They have found the skeleton of an adult gorgosaur (a type of tyrannosaur) with 7 half-grown gorgosaurs. Assuming this was a family group of a mom with kids, this means that a gorgosaur had at LEAST 7 kids at a time, and probably more, since it's likely not all the babies survived to half-grown. This is an elephant-sized predator hatching 7+ eggs at a whack. We don't know how long Gorgosaurs waited between egg clutches but I doubt it was over 2 years. Compare to an elephant, which has 1 baby every 2 years at most.

We know from fossils that Pachyrhinosaurus (2-4 tons) laid eggs yearly, and my guess is many dinosaurs followed this pattern.
2/

In early 2006 I was in charge of creating The Warchiefs, an expansion to Age of Empires 3. In Age 3, native sites were on the map, and you could ally with one by building a trade post. But the native town itself couldn’t be harmed.

The native towns produced unique units that were often helpful.

What I wanted to do was make full-blown playable native civs. 🧵 I chose three, which I felt would have different play styles. Iroquois, Sioux, & Aztec. The testers loved them. We moved right along. And then suits from Microsoft got involved.

A special “strike team” was sent to talk to us. They were ostensibly about localization but in reality their job was to make products worse so they wouldn’t offend anyone.

Before they laid into us, they showed us an example of their work. It was some MS business software.

They showed the first cover art for the software. It was a stylized sketch of a woman in a business dress. Classy & understated. The strike team said, “We can’t show a woman because it will offend some cultures.”

The replacement art showed stick figures at desks working. The strike team said, “This was unusable too, because showing a human figure offends some cultures.”

The final art was really stylized line drawings of computers at desks, empty and lifeless.

After showing this shipwreck of design, literally ruining the cover of this software product, the strike team preened themselves on their multicultural wisdom.

We were aghast. If that is the BEST example of their work they could find what the heck did they have planned for us?! 🧵

How to get your dream project - corporate politicking.

After my successes with Rise of Rome and The Conquerors, I was a shoe-in to do the expansion for Age of Empires 3. But I had a problem. The natural assumption everyone had was that this expansion would be Asian civs. I did not want to do Asian civs because it was stupid - 1600s Japan, India, China & Korea were emphatically not in colonizing moods. And believe it or not, I do care a little about historical verisimilitude. (Mainly because I think it makes the game more fun, but still...)

So what I wanted to do was to turn some of the Native Americans into playable civs. Why? I think Indians are awesome and I wanted to see them as more than the minor allies they were presented as in the original game.

But how could I do this? MicroSoft expected Asians. The suits in charge at Ensemble expected Asians. The other leads on the project expected Asians. And the rest of the non-lead team members expected Asians.

Here's how I went about it. (Oh yeah, if you thought the Warchiefs was dumb then you're a bad person with bad opinions. So there. But you may still find something useful in my tale.)
1/ First, I had to convince MYSELF that the Natives would be cool. I wanted to give them a new and interesting ability and make them undeniably cool. I worked on this for a while, coming up with the Firepit idea (which lets the Indian villagers dance for special powers) and the Warchief unit, which is way different from the European Scouts because the Warchief can "convert" wild animals on the map to his team which is super-fun. I also decided the three civs would be the Sioux, the Aztecs, and the Iroquois, which would be interestingly different. Later on they changed the name of the Sioux to the Lakota but I want you to know that I actually PHONED the Seven Council Fires and was told in person by native representatives that Sioux was a perfectly good term for them. Though of course Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota also worked. I stuck with Sioux as being more inclusive. (I assume the name was eventually changed because of white men activists, not natives, because it was white Seattle natives who thought it should be Lakota back in the day.)

The Aztecs wouldn't have gunpowder or horses, the Sioux would be heavily cavalry-based, and the Iroquois would be kind of a "high tech" Native civ. Anyway I was an easy sell, because I'd been thinking about this for a while.

Second, I took all the other leads (consisting of the producer, the lead programmer & the lead artist) out to a long business lunch and we hammered out all the details. Basically I proselyted how cool the natives would be, and how much neater a horde of screaming charging Sioux would be than a stand of Mughal archers. And by the end of that (3 hour) lunch I had them all convinced. I'd answered their arguments, presented ideas they liked, and got them on my side.
2/

The first real fight between Shermans and Panthers was at Arracourt, September 1944. It’s not widely known. It was an attempt by Hitler to keep Devers’ 6th Army Group, which had landed in southern France, from linking to Bradley’s 12th Army Group. 1/11 The German goal was to keep the two US Army Groups apart as long as possible so their troops trapped in France could escape. Patton’s Third Army was the target.

At the same time, Montgomery had launched Market Garden - the ill-fated airborne landings in Belgium & Holland. 2/11