nixsight

As are the Carthaginians…

The larger part of my weekend was spent re-visiting Rome – Total War, a game that I thought I’d played to my ultimate satisfaction (or frustration) when I first bought it, months ago. The sad fact is that while I love strategy games, I don’t have the staying power for them, succeeding perfectly well in the short term but not having the management skills for the long game… and Total War is all about the long game.

At some point it becomes a dangerous balancing act between the boom of expansion through invasion and the bust of the inevitably pissed-off populace in all the places you’ve ground beneath your armies’ historically-accurate boots… have you left enough troops to keep the place safe from revenge attacks? And troops are expensive… while your armies are abroad, are your less defended core countries becoming squalid?

There’s a lot to consider. And at the point where you’re no longer playing the invading army arrows game (I’m vaguely convinced that all Brit strategy gamers got into the obsession via a love of the opening sequence of Dad’s Army, with all it’s wonderful and comedic graphical simplicity), my organisational skills start to falter.

And it occured to me yesterday that all I’m doing with these games is a more complicated version of what I always used to do with my various Rubik’s cubes in the eighties… I can get one side done in a matter of seconds from any starting point, but I struggle with the 3-dimensional requirements… The problem (or innate challenge) of the ‘cube was that aiming for the single side fucked you for getting the whole thing. There’s a lesson to be learned from the deceptively simple puzzle about patience and the less direct approach. All very zen and cool…

But knowing all this doesn’t help me now that the Egyptians are aiming for my no-longer-protected sandy ass.