What are you currently playing?

[antisocialmunky]

Steel Division is supposed to have a proper supressive fire based morale system right?

As to the RTS question, different RTS games have different micro/macro balances and different micro/macro ceilings with their own pacing. For example, Supreme Commander is very tilted towards macro with a very high ceiling on macro and micro and slow pacing. The relic games have very basic, low skill ceiling macro (relatively), but extremely intense micro with a fast pacing. Starcraft has everything maxed out, its very fast, very micro, and macro intensive with extreme ceilings. People literally break from not being able to keep up with professional players. That's not really the problem though.

The real problem is Starcraft's longevity. With its longevity, it won the RTS genre and was the King of Esports for so long that every RTS that doesn't have super demanding micro + macro and spawns an Esport is considered a failure. Every new original property in the genre is automatically compared to it and the expectations are skewed because a game with 0 time to develop a scene is compared to something that's been around for 20 years. If the game isn't the next Starcraft, its considered a failure. Its literally comparing every new board game to chess and saying the new game has no depth.

Someone just needs to make RTS fun again which is apparently harder said than done.

I think the games that found the best balance for actual having fun were actually the old Command and Conquer games ending with Red Alert 2. Those were pretty sedate and fun to play, requiring only a moderate skill level pretty close to the skill ceiling of the game. Its fun even to go back and play them. Generals and Tiberium Wars were more geared towards competing with Starcraft and Esports niche which ultimately killed the series I think. The same thing just happened with DoW3 actually. They stripped out a lot of the atmosphere and ambience of that game so it is more easily to visually parse for spectating. :\

Anyway, apparently the 8bit army games are pretty close to old CnC. The lack of an indepth campaign to give the game personality really hurts it however.

[AdrienIer]

Steel Division is supposed to have a proper supressive fire based morale system right?

Yep. It works well combined with their cover system. Managing scouts infantry artillery tanks anti-tank and air support at the same time is a bit complicated at first but at least you don't have to manage a base or anything

[wetbandit]

Has anyone played secret hitler and care to give a review? It's a mafia/werewolf game. Considering playing it with a full group when folks visit around comic-con time. I'm interested in seeing how it might play out first. I haven't tried it at all, but I see it's on tabletop simulator. I suppose it might work forum-style also a la mafia, but uh, you probably would need a moderator (for which I would happily volunteer). Thoughts?

[rho21]

I play it weekly at work; we get one to two games in during our lunch hour.

I'm not a great fan of hidden roles games in general, but I really enjoy Secret Hitler because the amount of deduction you can do from structural information in the game is high. By contrast I don't get on with mafia/werewolf because it's mostly "social" deduction: reading people, in other words. For the same reasons, I find Resistance kind of meh, but Avalon worth playing.

Teams
So, let's give a bit more detail. There are two teams: liberals and fasicsts. One of the fascist team is Hitler, who has no extra information. The other fascists know who each other are and who Hitler is. That's it, no other hidden roles or special powers to be sad when you don't get them.

Elections
The game consists of a number of elections. Someone starts as the presidential candidate; they choose a chancellor as running mate. Everyone votes on this government. If there is not a majority in favour, the presidency passes to the left, a chancellor is selected and another election occurs. If the government is elected, it will produce a policy. [Additional rules: players who were part of the last government cannot be selected as chancellor; if 3 governments are voted down in a row, a random policy is enacted.]

Policies
The primary mechanic is the passing of policies, which can be either liberal or fascist. There is a deck containing 11 fascist and 6 liberal policies. The president takes 3 policies from the top of the deck, discards one, and passes the other two to the chancellor. The chancellor selects one to discard and one to put into law. Between when the president draws policies and the chancellor enacts one, no-one may talk. This is the only time in the game when there are any talking restrictions.

Policy selection is where most of the information comes into the game. If a fascist policy is enacted, there's some suspicion cast on the members of the government, but there are enough fascist policies in the deck that perhaps the president just drew three of them. If a liberal policy is enacted, it all looks good for the government, but perhaps one of them is secretly Hitler, trying to make everyone think he's a liberal.
Of course if you were part of the government, you get lots of extra information. If you are a liberal president and pass a choice of policies to your chancellor, you will know if they chose well. Sometimes they will choose a fascist policy and you can announce they are a fascist... but will the other players believe you? Perhaps they will think you gave your chancellor no choice to force a fascist policy through and cast suspicion.

Win conditions
The first win condition is to pass enough policies of your team's type: the fascists win when 6 fascist policies have been enacted, the liberals when 5 liberal policies are in play.
So, what difference does Hitler make? The fascists can also win if Hitler is elected as chancellor when 3 or more fascist policies have already been passed (hence Hitler's need to appear as a good guy). The liberals can win if they manage to shoot Hitler.

Extra actions
Which brings us on to the extra actions. When a fascist policy is passed, it usually gives the president an extra action to take. Early on this will let you find out the party allegiance of another player, or let you select the next presidential candidate. Later, it will let you kill a player. If you kill Hitler, the liberals win... but is it worth chasing a suspicion of who Hitler is, or shooting someone you're pretty sure is a fascist? Of course, letting a fascist get this power will only make the liberals' task harder.

Summary
The large selection of accurate information brings a lot of tension and tactics to decisions. You won't be making critical decisions with no information very often... but you'd do well to get as much information as possible before 3 fascist policies have been passed, when it becomes possible for the fascists to win immediately.

On the minus side:

• It doesn't play as well with 5 as higher numbers.
  
• Sometimes you will be killed and can no longer participate in the game. Usually it doesn't last much longer after this, but occasionally it does. This still contrasts very favourably with mafia/werewolf.
  
• It can be a bit frustrating if you start to the right of the initial president and no-one chooses to put you in power for ages. Still, you can always vote the governments down and hope to get it round to you a bit quicker.
  

Overall: I'd give it an 8/10. I have a lot of fun playing this.

[rho21]

I could actually run a game of this on the forum if people are interested. (Note that you don't need a moderator for a face-to-face game, another advantage.)

[TheHumanHydra]

I'm always surprised how people on this forum play all kind of games except RTS or similar sub-categories

I've had an RTS revival the past couple years. I played Age of Empires II and its Star Wars clone, Galactic Battlegrounds, very heavily as a teen (only single player), then shifted to Civ IV when I had a computer, the one I got for university, that could run it. I enjoy neither base management nor the fast pace of RTSs and do enjoy long, sweeping games, so Civ appealed to me a great deal. For a long time, I couldn't even run AoE or GB for technical reasons. With their re-release on digital platforms, I picked them up for nostalgia's sake and now play them not infrequently. I don't know why, and I lament it, but my attention span for things like games and reading has gone way down since university, so the RTSs are nice as one-session activities. More importantly, though, I now have a group of friends I play AoE II with online, which keeps me in the game fairly often (I've never been good enough at any game except Civ to feel confident playing online with strangers). Concurrently, I also discovered the Total War series, and play Napoleon occasionally. I'd probably have tried to get into Rome II multiplayer, based on Heir of Carthage's videos, but my computer isn't good enough to run it. But the games that have occupied my divided attention the most since my university/Civ IV days have been been Skyrim and Hearts of Iron III, though it has now been many years since I've played even the former very much. Honestly, I've fallen into the sinkhole of the Internet and I don't know where the years have gone. This will sound weird, but I should actually make an effort to spend more time playing video games and, like, reading. Rediscover old joys; somehow, browsing forums takes so very long (not a slight against this one, which you get far more out of than most).

You probably didn't want to read all that, but I got sentimental.  TL;DR I do play Age of Empires and Total War casually.

[Fenn]

Age of Empires II...now there's some memories. Used to play that game all the time, not that I ever became much good at it. Still fire up the Steam remaster from time to time.

Lately I've been on a retro FPS kick, playing several Doom WADs (PLutonia and Pirate Doom most recently). Right now it's Ken's Labyrinth, an ancient Wolfenstein 3D clone. It has a focus on exploration and mazes more than combat, which is good because even the modern SDL port has no mouselook - I'm several hous in, butaiming and turning with just the keyboard is still alien to me.

[wetbandit]

I could actually run a game of this on the forum if people are interested. (Note that you don't need a moderator for a face-to-face game, another advantage.)

Thanks for the detailed review, rho!

[Twinkletoes89]

Given there's been a detailed response already that I agree with, I shall simply add that Secret Hitler is awesome. Whenever I have played it with friends, we have ended up playing round after round because its so engaging and fun

[antisocialmunky]

I could actually run a game of this on the forum if people are interested. (Note that you don't need a moderator for a face-to-face game, another advantage.)

I tried to get a table top simulator group for it but it never happened.  I would love to do it.