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#142 MEMO TO FIRAXIS: NOW THAT CTPII IS OUT Raingoon is back with a message to Firaxis: what to do and what not to in CivIII. #141 CIVILIZATION II ATE MY HAMSTER It's no laughing matter -- Lazarus & The Gimp talk about the continuous return to CivII. #140 A JOURNEY OF 1000 MILES BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP Heardie familiarizes us to a new "Civ"-inspired game entitled Guns, Germs and Steel: Tools of Conquest. #139 YOUR CITIES AND YOU Our first "celebrity" column, Activision's St. Swithin, talks about -- what else? -- CTPII. #138 TURN-BASED STRATEGY: THE THINKING PERSON'S GAME Father Beast returns to voice his opinion on the calibre of the turn-based strategist. COLUMN ARCHIVE

Recently there has been some discussion about the possible demise of turn based strategy games. While it may be true that publishers are not releasing too many TBS's these days, I submit that the genre is alive and well. As evidence, I turn your attention to one of the more underrated places here at Apolyton, the Alternative Civilization section (Alt Civs). It is there that you can find the future of TBS, firmly in the hands of independent game developers. The games under the Alt Civs grouping are quite diverse, but they all have one thing in common: They are all turn based strategy games.

Before I get into the particular games themselves, I want to digress a little and explain why these independent game projects, as a whole, deserve your attention. I've read (and I tend to believe, based on personal experience) that independent game development projects have close to a 98% fatality rate. Most never get beyond the initial design stage. Of those that do, many more die when coding begins. Designing a game is hard work. It's not nearly as much fun as playing one, though in the end it is much more rewarding. When you are sitting in front of a computer with the option of working on your unit database matrix code (boring!), or playing a quick game of Civ (or, heaven forbid, Quake), it's easy to see why many game development projects fade into the sunset.

With such a high fatality rate, it is inevitable that the Alt. Civ group suffer a couple of casualties. Stellar Civilizations and Ancient Prophecy both died in infancy. Both were very promising games, and it was a grievous loss to the group when each folded. But for all that, Alt. Civ has had a much higher success rate that it has any right to expect. In part, this is probably due to the fact that TBS game designers are a different breed of coders than your average game programmer. If you'll forgive my generalizations, Quake players (and, by extension, coders of such games) tend to favor instant results. Trust me when I tell you there is nothing instant about programming.

It takes years to design and implement a full game, and it's easy to see why independent designers often lose interest. People who play TBS's, on the other hand, tend to be more willing to carefully plan and wait for results, which is exactly the qualities needed to write games. The other reason the games under Alt Civ are bucking the 98% fatality statistic has to do with the designers involved. Somehow we've been lucky enough to have gathered a group of games under the leadership of people driven to create the best game they know how to create. And, if my fellow designers are anything like this writer, that drive borders on obsession. If you're not obsessed in this business, you probably aren't going to get very far. If the designers believe in them enough to spend years of their lives working on their projects, it follows there might be something interesting there. Perhaps you ought to go take a look?

Briefly I will go over each of the games listed in the Alt Civ section. I'm not doing them justice in these one paragraph blurbs, so if it looks even remotely interesting to you, please don't hesitate to go see their full descriptions in the Alt Civ section, or their respective web pages. They are in various stages of development, some are playable, others are not. Almost all of them have publicly downloadable versions available.

Manifest Destiny is well into its implementation phase, and is quickly approaching the first Alpha release. It features a spherical world, a huge technology tree (projected to be around 800 techs), dozens of unit templates (tanks, ships, satellites, etc) each of which can be fitted from your choice of hundreds of components (spears, rifles, machine guns, kevlar armor, etc). This is a game of epic proportions which will take you from pre-history (the discovery of fire) well into the future (shields, fusion tanks, etc). A current free demo is available for download, and is updated on (at least) a weekly basis.

The game of Freeciv is played in turns, which begin at the dawn of civilization, the year 4000 B.C.E., and run to the space age. In each turn, you, as the immortal, absolute ruler of your civilization, direct the movements and actions of your explorers, colonists, armies, and ships. You establish new cities and the construction of buildings within them, including the erection of Wonders of the World. Starting from a tiny band of colonists and explorers, able only to see a small portion of the world's surface, you discover and dominate more and more of the world.

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About the author: Ron is the Co-Designer and Lead Programmer for Manifest Destiny.

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