برچسب: Strategy

  • XCOM and Hunt Showdown inspire new strategy game and extraction shooter hybrid

    XCOM and Hunt Showdown inspire new strategy game and extraction shooter hybrid


    Ice Code Games, creator of Hard West 2 and last year’s Rogue Waters, has made a niche for itself in mashing up tactical combat design with supernaturally-infused historical settings. Hard West and its sequel take place in a 19th-century American West haunted by demonic creatures whereas Rogue Waters offers strategic pirate swashbuckling in monster-filled seas. Now, the studio is continuing in a similar vein with the announcement of its latest project, a blend of Hunt Showdown and XCOM 2 called Nightmare Frontier.

    Nightmare Frontier looks, at first blush, like a spiritual successor to the Hard West games. It, too, is a kind of strategy game set in the American West, where players have to contend with bloodthirsty monsters. From this foundation on up, though, it takes a pretty different approach, adding a risk-reward focused style of design to Hard West’s formula.

    In Nightmare Frontier, players control a group of desperate scavengers in a mission to find and collect loot in a town regularly attacked by creatures called Dreadweavers. As in extraction shooters like Hunt Showdown, the scavengers have to decide how long to fight off enemies, gathering increasing rewards as the danger grows, before it’s time to escape or risk losing what they’ve gained. When the player isn’t fighting, they’ll need to craft and upgrade their gear from the resources they’ve gathered and unlock new skills in preparation for their next round of combat.

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    Nightmare Frontier is set to launch in Early Access on Steam this summer. Wishlist it or find more information on its Steam page right here.

    Otherwise, you can bide the time between now and Nightmare Frontier’s launch by taking a look at our picks for the best horror games and best action-adventure games already out on PC.

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  • Resistance Avalon – any strategy better than staying silent?

    Resistance Avalon – any strategy better than staying silent?


    I am looking for any game theoretical insights for the most basic form of The Resistance: Avalon. Specifically I am looking at a 5 player game, with just two added roles: Merlin and the Assassin. I am looking at strategies that can be executed without using psychology, tells, hidden messages (including but not limited to cryptography and signing) etc.

    Without the additional roles – ie the vanilla version of the original Resistance game – it is quite easy to calculate the winning chances for the rebels if both sides play optimally – for it is 30% (assuming the traitors can avoid double-failing missions with two spies). The good team basically has three chances to identify the spies (or the good team). And they have nothing better than chance to rely on, so they will choose each of the 10 possible teams with equal probability, for a total of 3/10 winning chance.

    When adding Merlin, things seem to be worse for the good guys! If he takes no action to help the good team, he just reduces their winning chances to 20% (since he has a 1/3 chance of being killed). If he does help the good team, he increases their winning chances – but he also increases his chances of being killed. Any action he takes, or statement he makes, which sways the other players to choose the right team, will also be visible by the bad guys. Assuming no hidden communication, they will see each of the statements made, and know who encouraged the winning team, or discouraged the losing ones.

    So is there any strategy for the good team which does better than 20% in this setup? The strategy must be known to all players ahead of time. Just to make it absolutely clear: I am not asking for ways to “hint” to your team-mates which team to pick, without the bad guys noticing or understanding what is going on.



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  • reference – Strategy games with well-developed theory

    reference – Strategy games with well-developed theory


    There are a few strategy games with a large published literature expounding the “theory” or advanced strategies of the game. Go, chess (and related games such as Chinese chess and shogi), bridge, poker, and blackjack come to mind. I know of a couple of other games with a smaller literature, such as checkers, backgammon, and Scrabble, and a few more games about which just one or two notable “theory” books seem to have been written, such as Othello, Hex, Connect 4, Dots and Boxes, and Nine Men’s Morris.

    Are there other games with a small but substantive amount of published theory? To set some parameters, I’m interested only in games for which there exists at least one full-length book devoted entirely (or almost entirely) to advanced strategies for the game. So for example, for Monopoly, I’m only aware of The Monopoly Book by Maxine Brady, which doesn’t quite meet the threshold I’m looking for, because it devotes a lot of space to history and basic explanation of the rules, and does not delve that deeply into advanced strategy (but if there are other, more advanced books on Monopoly, then I’d love to hear about them).



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