Archive for the 'Strategy' Category


Heroes Chronicles: Big Room

Well, I finally got the Town Portal spell. And just in time, too: map 6 is the kind of vast, sprawling thing where it’s really needed. It’s also highly open. Since this is the Underworld, most of the maps have been largely made of narrow tunnels, which makes it harder to find your way to where you want to go, but at the same time makes it easier to defend your turf. With tunnels, you pretty much don’t need to leave troops to defend your castles. On an open map like this one, enemy heroes can just slip through the gaps between mine and make a beeline for my castles. Which means I need a way to get defenders to my castles quickly, which is presumably why this is the level where the Town Portal spell appears.

It reminds me a little of the “big room” level in Nethack, which also puts you into an open space where it’s harder to defend. The similarities pretty much end there, though.

Town Portal helps, but I only have three significantly powerful heroes, and I’d really like them out in the front most of the time, exploring new territory and conquering new castles instead of playing defense. I’m kind of getting the hang of how this works. In the past, my chief priority was to buy as many creatures as I could as soon as they became available for purchase and get them to the main heroes as quickly as possible. That’s not such a concern now that Tarnum is Mr. Overkill. Instead, the thing that makes sense is to wait until an enemy approaches a castle and only then fill it with defenders. The troops available for hire build up over time, and this way I don’t wind up wasting my money on pikemen in a castle that never gets attacked.

Purchasing the defenders not only makes the castle’s defense stronger, it makes them unavailable for purchase in those cases where the enemy takes over the castle anyway. And that’s another change made by this level: Castles are plentiful. You don’t have to hold onto them like grim death; if an enemy takes one, you can probably take it back next turn. If you’re lucky, he’ll even spend some money on a new building. But it’s a nuisance when they actually manage to grow their army in the process.

And that’s about all the enemy is to me at this point: a nuisance. Maybe it’s time to turn the difficulty up another notch. It’ll have to wait, though, for reasons I’ll get into in my next post.

Heroes Chronicles: Angelic Alliance

I’ve just had a bit of a relief. Back in map 3 of Conquest of the Underworld, there’s a scripted event wherein someone advises Tarnum to keep a certain enchanted helm, sword, and necklace on his person at all times. This was worrying because I had only found the helm and the sword. Had I missed the necklace? Would I have to start over yet again to find it? Looking at saved games from the previous levels, I found that I had done a pretty thorough job of searching them, and thus I plunged ahead. It ultimately showed up on the fifth of the game’s eight maps.

I’m guessing that the misleading text there is a holdover from an earlier draft of the plot, one where things happened in a different order. The helmet, sword, and necklace referred to are pieces of a six-part ensemble called the Angelic Alliance, one of the uniting features of the campaign as a whole. Each piece is a powerful stat-booster in its own right, and apparently obtaining the full set makes you even more ridiculously buff. Each map except the first and (I assume) the last contains one piece.

Now, there’s a long history of this kind of synergetic uber-outfit in CRPGs — Wizardry 2 may have been the first to do it. And it’s a pretty good fit to RPG-like gameplay. But Heroes isn’t a RPG. At least, it claims to be a strategy game, and it’s hard to see how the Angelic Alliance can avoid exacerbating a problem endemic to hero-stack-based strategy games: that the strategy tends to devolve into just putting all your troops and magic items and so forth onto one hero and sending him on a rampage. Being able to simply overpower your opponents is anathema to actual strategic thought.

It all comes down to the positive-feedback problem again. Even without the power duds, the three heroes that I’m allowed to bring with me from map to map have stats well above the norm for their experience level, due to having gone through five maps worth of permanent upgrades. The same thing happened when I played the first Heroes Chronicles episode, Warlords of the Wasteland. I responded then by turning the difficulty up, and I’m doing the same thing now.

But really, it’s like the designers don’t see it as a problem. They embrace it, encourage it even. Not only have they designed the whole campaign around an opportunity to turn Tarnum into an unstoppable badass who can take down a demon horde with a handful of pikemen, they actually have that NPC I mentioned in the first paragraph. Just in case you decided to spread the stat boosts around among your heroes, he’s there to tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

Heroes Chronicles: Spells and Size

Map 3 of Conquest of the Underworld was excruciatingly long, and made longer by my stubborn insistence on building up the mage guild in every town in hope that I’d finally get the Town Portal spell. In theory, once I get it, I’ll be able to do things a lot faster, but the whole pursuit has kind of backfired so far. I probably should have started casting divination spells sooner. There’s a bunch of spells that reveal different things about the map, but for a long time I was doing things the hard way, scouting manually, because I had forgotten all about overland spells. This is not a game that doles out spells in manageble chunks and lets you get used to them bit by bit, so I find it easy to get lost in the spell list and not know what I should be using. Perhaps the designers assumed the player was already familiar with them all from Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

There’s one thing that keeps the options for a spellcaster from being overwhelming most of the time: Cursed ground. This is a terrain type that sucks magic out of the air. When fighting on cursed ground, you can’t use spells above level 1. Most of the Underworld seems to be made out of it. Mind you, even level 1 spells scale in power with the caster’s stats, so this limitation isn’t quite as limiting as it sounds.

After the vastness of map 3, where the chief challenge was getting heroes and creatures where they were needed efficiently, it was a bit shocking how tiny map 4 is. It’s so tiny that there’s no time to build up your forces before taking on the three other armies tussling over it. You pretty much have to just strike out half-prepared and hope to pick up more troops along the way. But then, this seems to be the way that the level designers want you to play even on the larger levels, where the distance separating you from your enemies grants you the luxury of building up an army first if you want to. If you play that way, though, there are scripted events that don’t make sense — for example, you’ll get directions to find an artifact after the enemy has already made off with it.

At any rate, I seem to be getting the hang of this, so I’ve kicked the difficulty back up a notch. Key points:
1. Scout with magic, not with heroes.
2. Take full advantage of roadside monster factories.
3. Don’t be shy about using magic in combat mode, even if you can win a fight without it. Mana is cheap; troops are not.

Heroes Chronicles: Plot

My last session was rather short — I finished up map 2, but that’s about it. So for this post, I’ll just describe the story so far. The story is basically irrelevant to gameplay here, but I’d like to see it unfold all the same; part of the reason I started over was to refamiliarize myself with it, and part of my motivation for writing about it now is to help me skip the early levels if I take another year-long break.

The event that kicks the whole campaign off is the abduction of the knightly King Rion Gryphonheart of Erathia. Or rather, of his soul. His daughter, Queen Allison, has a vision, shared with the player in the opening cutscene: demons sneak into Heaven and carry him back to Hell with them, for purposes unknown.

(Speaking of cutscenes, I should note a peculiarity of the game. Every level is introduced with a brief looping video clip, but they seem to re-use the same clips in every episode of the Heroes Chronicles series. They’re not in the same order every time, but they all seem to be used. For example, one clip shows heroes feasting in a feasting-hall, so every episode has to come up with some excuse to show that scene. Presumably some limitation of the engine prevented them from using anything other than the standard Heroes of Might and Magic 3 clips. It’s a bit like watching an Ed Wood movie, spliced together out of whatever stock footage was available. At any rate, the opening cutscene is an exception, probably because it gets shown before the game proper begins.)

Now, In most contexts, I wouldn’t consider the hallucinations of the grieving to be sufficient evidence to launch an invasion of Hell itself. But our hero Tarnum basically has no choice to go along with it, being a bonded lackey of “the Ancestors”, the patrons of the Barbarians who Tarnum ruled with an iron fist during his natural life. There’s just one part that Tarnum doesn’t understand: Rion was an enemy of the Barbarians. In fact, he personally killed Tarnum. Is this assignment some kind of cosmic joke the Ancestors are playing on Tarnum? Punishment for his misdeeds in life? Whatever the reason, Tarnum has to lead the Queen’s forces incognito.

Well, It turns out that there isn’t such a gulf separating the knights from the barbarians. A lot of the knights have Barbarian blood — they haven’t always been at war, after all. In fact, Queen Allison’s mother was a Barbarian. So I suppose the Ancestors want me to help Allison because she’s the closest thing there is to a Barbarian ruler right now. Not only that, but — you can see this coming, can’t you? — Allison’s mother was related to Tarnum. On that fateful day when Rion faced the Barbarian tyrant, he unwittingly slew his own brother-in-law. He’s like a lamer version of Oedipus. 1Metaphorically speaking, that is. Physically, Oedipus is the lamer one.

That’s basically three levels worth of plot there. There are eight levels total in the episode. One other point I think is worth mentioning: the knights talk about Barbarians, and characterize them as stupid, uncouth savages. This causes Tarnum considerable distress, even though, to most of us, that’s pretty much the definition of “barbarian”. I’d be hard-pressed to say whether “barbarian” or “savage” is more of an insult, but Tarnum takes pride in one label and shame in the other. But he has to admit that there’s some truth in what they say: in the time since his death, his people have started to forget honor. It all reminds me of a bit from one of the later Ultimas, which carries the idea even further, in the diary of an ancient Troll-king that the player can find. This noble and eloquent troll did a rip-van-winkle, emerging from a cave centuries after he went in, and was shocked and dismayed at what trolls had become over the centuries, and how the universally admired troll civilization had degenerated into dirty, oafish brutes who hide under bridges. That troll died, mistaken for a monster. Which is kind of the opposite of Tarnum’s story. In life, he was a monster; now, he’s mistaken for a knight.

References
1 Metaphorically speaking, that is. Physically, Oedipus is the lamer one.

Heroes Chronicles: Starting Over Again

And now for some unfinished business. Last year, I was in the middle of a game when the IF Comp started up. Unlike this year, I abandoned it in order to play the comp games. So, it’s been over a year since I looked at this game — enough time that I feel like I have to replay the beginning in order to get back into it. This is of course one of the ways that the Stack maintains its size. This time, however, I am unabashedly playing at a lower difficulty, adopting the same attitude as I did towards Etherlords towards the end. And the content is familiar enough that I’m most of the way through map 2 already.

That familiarity. It hit me like an ocean wave to the face when I started the game up after a year’s pause. If learning a game makes circuits in the brain, those circuits go dormant when you stop playing. But, being dormant rather than dead, they perk up again at the right stimulus and merrily go through their paces, grateful for the attention. There’s a real pleasure there that you don’t get from just playing the latest games steadily until you get tired of them.

Etherlords: Finished

Well, that didn’t take long. It seems that all it really takes to motivate me to keep playing a game without pause until I reach the end is continual tangible progress. As in, the kind of progress that doesn’t happen when you’ve got the difficulty set too high.

I should mention that part of the reason it took me less time than I was expecting was that I made some discoveries about the user interface that got things going faster. It turns out that you can skip most animations by pressing the space bar, which I apparently hadn’t tried before. Well, it’s a highly mouse-driven game in most other respects. In most of my sessions, I didn’t even touch the keyboard, and I probably still wouldn’t have tried it if I weren’t recently involved in some space-bar-skippable animations in a different context. I knew that Etherlords lets you turn animations off entirely through the options menu, but I had found this to produce glitches, and besides, I didn’t want to turn them off entirely. Watching the animations is part of the charm of the game. At least, it is the first few times for each type of monster. But I was stuck for ages on a level where I was playing Team Black, which has Mech Worms as its basic starting unit, and not only do Mech Worms have a frustratingly slow crawling-forward-to-attack animation, they automatically attack every round (that is, they have the “berserk” attribute). So I was very glad to not have to sit through that again.

But even with that assistance, I couldn’t have breezed through the remainder of the game in the span of a day if I hadn’t been unexpectedly close to the end. In my last post, I was on level 5. It turns out that there are only 7 or 8 levels, depending on how you count the end boss.

Map 6 shakes things up a little by giving you no castle, and thus no way to cast overland spells, such as the spell that summons new heroes. So, you’re stuck with what you start with — a traditional variation found in strategy games of this sort. Usually such levels derive tension from the slow attrition of your irreplacable troops, but since Etherlords heals your heroes completely between battles, that’s not really a factor here. The map does limit the resources you need to cast spells, but you can pick up more stuff from monsters, and at any rate, it just doesn’t feel the same.

Map 7 is where the alliances finally break apart. You’re on the threshhold of the grand prize, so it’s every etherlord for himself. I’ve been playing the red/black campaign, so at this point I had to choose red or black. I chose red — that’s the team that has my O(n2) kobolds, which proved quite useful. Ultimately, though, I didn’t need my heroes to defeat my three computer-controlled rivals. This is a really big map, with a lot of mines and ether nodes scattered around, and once you have above a certain threshhold of spell fuel coming in every turn, you can destroy the opponent castles with overland spells alone. You don’t even have to know where the castles are, which is fortunate, because even after I had destroyed them, it took me a while to find them. At any rate, the real bosses of the level are the level 12 dragons, the most powerful beings in the game up to that point, who guard the entrance to the Temple of Time, where the final challenge awaits.

The final level doesn’t even have a map. It’s just a duel against the White Lord, holder of ultimate power over the cosmos. It is this power that the etherlords crave; your goal is to kill him and take his place. He’s level 15. But for the final fight, you get a level 15 character as well, and you get to choose whatever assortment of spells you feel like, provided of course that they’re your color. (The White Lord is not limited to one color.)

Now, this was clearly going to be a high-powered fight. High-level characters have more hit points and get mana faster than low-level characters, and these were the two highest-level characters I had ever seen. So I figured I should try the Mana Burn trick. Mana Burn is an enchantment that makes unused mana hurt. It cuts both ways, though, so if you use it, you have to be sure you have some kind of mana sink — something that has a power-up effect that can use arbitrary quantities of mana — so that your own excess mana doesn’t damage you. There are a couple of “wall”-type summonables (things that can’t attack but can block attacks) that fit the bill. Anyway, it seemed like this approach would be a good fit for a long fight with lots of hit points, because the number of open mana channels just keeps on increasing, and there’s only so much an unprepared opponent can do with them.

Apparently the designers of the game came to the same conclusion: the White Lord also used the Mana Burn strategem, but did it better than me. I couldn’t even imitate what he did, because of the way he mixed colors. It took me five or six tries to catch onto a winning modified strategy, mixing in some Cyclopes and some Disintegrate spells. (The advantage of Disintegrate is that it removes creatures from play entirely, so they can’t regenerate or rise from the dead. The White Lord had some things that kept coming back.)

etherlords-whitelordAt which point it turned out to be one of those two-stage boss fights, with the real White Lord showing up encased in some kind of robotic life support tube or something. This time he’s level 20, and uses a completely different strategy, involving creatures with the special property that they can’t be targetted by spells, which rendered my lovely Disintegrates useless. Nonetheless, I managed to get past this part on my first try, although it was a close thing.

And so I hand over ultimate power to the Chaots, the fire-and-bloodhshed faction. This isn’t going to be a pleasant eon. Of course, eventually the stars will align again and someone else will come to challenge the new White Lord — it’s that sort of ending. I suppose that if I don’t actually sympathize with the player character, there’s at least some consolation in knowing that he’s going to be locked up in that temple for a few thousand years.

At this point, you might be wondering about the other sides. There are two separate campaigns — or four, once you’re past map 6. Can I really say I’m finished with the game if I’ve only completed one? This is really something tha varies from game to game. In Starcraft, for example, playing only one side would be ludicrous — you’d be missing out on 2/3 of the gameplay, not to mention 2/3 of the plot. But Etherlords is much more symmetrical than that. From what I’ve seen of the campaigns, it’s clear that they really only differ significantly at the tactical level, in combat mode. I’ve seen what campaign mode has to offer, and don’t need to see the same thing from the other side. But I am kind of curious about the end boss. The Mana Burn gimmick is something only available to the Chaots. How do the other sides deal with it? Does the White Lord, in fact, choose different decks depending on who invades his sanctum? If I ever decide to play this game more, it’ll be to satisfy my curiosity on those questions.

Etherlords: Shifting Down to Normal

Well, if I’m going to play a game where I’m stuck, it might as well be one where I can get myself unstuck fairly easily. Turning the difficulty down a notch in Etherlords has given me the ability to smack down the enemy heroes without undue difficulty — at one point I was surprised to take down a level 5 enemy with a level 2 hero who hadn’t even yet had a chance to purchase better spells. I still haven’t completed map 5 yet, due to occasional crashes (thank goodness for autosave!), but I’ve destroyed all of the enemy castles and don’t have to worry about being attacked at all, and thus can take my time upgrading a single hero to take on the actual mission objectives (destroying some “war altars” guarded by powerful elementals).

What we have here is the effects of very strong positive feedback — that is, the winners tend to keep on winning and the losers tend to keep on losing. Each side has only one or two heroes of significant strength. If you can attack the enemy’s strongest heroes and win, there’s nothing they can do to stop you; if you can’t, there’s nothing you can do to stop them. The weird thing is, this is a strategy game with multiple sides, and that’s usually a recipe for strong negative feedback, with anyone who seems like they’re pulling ahead suddenly finding their allies turning against them. But the alliances in the single-player campaign here are set in stone. (Or so it seems so far, anyway — there’s a whole Diplomacy interface that might come into play at some point, but currently I’m thinking it’s solely for online multiplayer play.)

So, the fact that the designers aren’t playing to their design’s strengths here hammers home the point (for which I’ve already noted other supporting evidence in previous posts) that the pseudo-multiplayer aspect of the game wasn’t the focus of their attention. And at this point, I’m willing to conclude that it therefore shouldn’t be the focus of my attention either. If I keep the difficulty set where it was before, I’ll spend the majorty of my play time on a fraction of the map, replaying the first few turns over and over in the hope of surviving to the midgame. If I turn it down, my assailants turn into a mere inconvenience to be faced as I roam about seeking treasures, fighting stationary monsters, levelling up, and generally treating the game more like a traditional RPG than a strategy game. The latter approach holds more appeal to me. Let the map be my enemy.

Etherlords: Plans

Etherlords is shaping up to be this year’s game that I play between playing other games, like Serious Sam and Throne of Darkness last year. Last night brought some more lack of progress on map 5. I’ll probably wind up ratcheting the difficulty down a notch soon, but there are still a couple of approaches I want to try.

My last failure was based on speculation that the different types of terrain were strategically significant. The Kinets’ home turf, for example, is covered with snow. The enemy heroes are often strangely reluctant to attack me when they can; could it be that walking on their territory triggers aggression? Well, apparently not.

The next thing I want to try is aggressively attacking the Kinet castle ethereally. I don’t even really hope to destroy it this way. If I do, great. But I’m mainly seeing this as a risk-free way to make the Kinets waste resources on defense — risk-free because ethereal combat never kills the heroes involved. I don’t even have to give my attacker any expensive spells, as long as expensive spells are wasted against him.

In fact, I had a near-breakthrough last night with a hero who still had the underpowered default spellbook. My castle came under siege by a level 6 Kinet while I was summoning a new level 5 hero, so the first thing I did with him was attack my besieger. It worked better than I had hoped, because my deck, being low-powered, was a lot faster than his: I had five little monsters nipping his heels at a point when he still had a only a single defender. By the time he brought out his heavy hitters and ended the battle, he was actually down to 1 health. Emboldened, I restored to just before the combat and tried it again twice, but with much lesser success. So it looks like that first try was just unusually lucky.

I’m doing a lot of that these days, restoring to just before the last turn. The game makes it easy by autosaving every time you hit the “end turn” button. Usually I don’t do this to repeat battles in the hope of being luckier next time, but rather, to issue different orders and avoid the battle I lost. Still, the fact that I’m doing it so much is a pretty clear sign that dialling down the difficulty level is warranted.

Etherlords: Big O

In my last post, I described a very effective combo using Kobold Elders and Kobold Shamans. By the end of map 4, I had two high-level heroes, one of whom was using this combo. The other, which had progressed around the map by a different route and had encountered different spells, was using a different technique, one that’s more elementary (so much so that I hesitate to call it a combo) but also quite effective: a deck made mostly out of rats and anger.

The common stink rat is the beginner’s monster for team red: it’s 1/1 and costs 1 mana to cast. Anger is an enchantment that gives all your creatures +1 to their attack power. This bonus stacks, so your damage potential increases with both the number of rats and the number of Angers. Of course, the same bonus applies to non-rats, and that’s important sometimes — I put a couple of bats into this deck as well, because a couple of the enemies had a spell called Flood that disables anything that can’t fly — but the rats were cheap and disposable, and the strategem works better with lots of creatures than with a few powerful ones.

Both of these decks have the advantage that they start damaging the opponent immediately: kobold shamans and stink rats both cost 1 mana, so you can summon them on your very first turn. But more importantly, they’re both O(n2). That is, your potential to do damage on a turn, barring interference, is roughly proportional to the square of the number of turns that have passed. Even though the amount of mana available to you increases with every turn, you still only get to draw cards at a constant rate per turn. So in the long run, the number of instances of a spell active at any moment is going to be linear on the more limiting factor, time. But the damage potential of these strategems is determined by the product of the number of instances of two different spells.

There are other combos with this property; it may in fact be a feature of every deck that wins at high levels. In fact, there’s one instance I’ve observed of a spell that’s O(n2) without a combo: Grass Snakes. Every time a grass snake hits the opponent hero for damage, its attack power (and health, but that’s not what I’m considering here) increases by 1. I suppose this means that a snakes-and-anger deck would be O(n3). [Edit: Not really, see comments.] (Actually, that combo is impossible: Anger is red, and snakes are green, and never the twain shall meet. But apparently there are a few rare green spells that have a similar buff-all-friendlies effect.)

But I doubt that such a deck would actually function as O(n3) in practice, because the bonus on the snakes is per-snake, which makes it vulnerable. Every time a snake dies, any bonus it built up dies with it. The other decks I described are more robust: if you kill my rat, the next rat I summon will be just as angry. Catching up to where you were is linear (that is, O(n)) on the number of rats killed. For snakes, in the worst case it’s linear on the number of turns the oldest snake was alive… which, now that I think about it, makes it also linear on the number of snakes killed, because both the maximum age and the number of snakes are linear on the number of turns played so far. I guess big-O notation doesn’t tell us everything.

Here’s a better analysis: If you can kill my (oldest) snakes at the same rate as I can summon replacements, my damage potential from snakes will never increase. Whereas in the rat/anger deck, a rat equilibrium will just slow me down from O(n2) to O(n), because I’ll still be casting Anger at a constant rate. Unless you have spells that remove enchantments and we have equilibrium there too. I suppose what I mean by “robust” is that disrupting it completely requires more things.

Etherlords: Combos

Probably the biggest joy in CCG-style play is coming up with combos. By “combo”, I don’t mean the kind you get in, say, tile-matching games, where the rules explicitly grant bonuses for things that are not valuable in themselves. I mean emergent synergy, the special properties of different cards combining in a way that makes them more effective. This is the essence of deck construction.

For example, in Magic: the Gathering, there is a card called “Lure”. (Or at least, there was when I was playing it. A lot of cards were removed in subsequent revisions.) Lure is an enchantment that you cast on a creature. When a creature with Lure makes an attack, anything that can block it must do so. By itself, this would typically mean that the creature with Lure is met with overwhelming force and dies, but in the process, it lets your stronger attackers go unblocked for that turn, because blockers can only block one thing at a time. But if you put that Lure on a creature with Regeneration, it can survive the onslaught and play its part over and over, or at least until the opponent kills it with direct damage spells. Alternately, you can put it on a Thicket Basilisk, which has the special power that anything blocking it dies at the end of the combat round, and wipe out all the opponent’s creatures in one turn. Put all three cards (Lure, Regeneration, Thicket Basilisk) in your deck and you have a three-card combo with the potential to wipe out your opponent’s army every turn — but only if you happen to get them all in your hand and manage to cast both of the enchantments on the basilisk before the opponent kills it. With a minimum deck size of 40 cards, three-card combos can be hard to pull off.

The dynamic is a little different in Etherlords. For one thing, the 15-card deck size makes it almost certain that any combos you put in will come up. Also, some combos are more explicit than what I’ve just described. Each type of creature comes in multiple subtypes, with different levels of strength and different special abilities, and sometimes those special abilities are pretty clearly linked. Take the Kobold Elder: its power is to untap all Kobolds in play other than Kobold Elders. This is an ability that can only be used in combination with a rather small set of other cards. If you ask me, the only other kind of Kobold worth having in your hand is the Kobold Shaman, which is the Etherlords version of M:tG‘s Prodigal Sorcerer: you tap it to do 1 point of damage to any player or creature. Thus, if you have both in your deck, you get to do (number of Kobold Elders times number of Kobold Shamans) points of damage every turn, without even making an attack or casting any spells. This is potent. In one encounter late in map 4, I was routinely killing things with 8 or 9 health (that is, the hardiest creatures I had yet encountered) the moment they appeared.

Both of these effects — the smaller deck size and the signalling of likely combos through creature type — serve to make combos easier. The former makes them easier to execute, the latter makes them easier to discover. I can’t know if this was the result of a deliberate policy of combo-friendliness on the part of the designers or just a happy accident reinforced by playtesting, but that’s how it turned out. The downside, I suppose, is that it makes the combos seem very planned, and leaves little scope for the player to make genuinely new discoveries. But this is OK for a computer game with fixed content. Real CCGs take advantage of the combinatorial explosion to create an impression of infinitely variable gameplay. But campaign modes in strategy games are more about introducing you to gameplay elements one by one, and typically end when they run out of new things to show you. I expect that’s how it is here.

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