strategy

mechwarrior-5:-clans-is-supposed-to-be-newbie-friendly,-and-i-put-it-to-the-test

MechWarrior 5: Clans is supposed to be newbie-friendly, and I put it to the test

battletech, gaming, mechwarrior, mechwarrior 5, mechwarrior 5 clans, strategy / /

There are multiple layers to a Clans battle. There is your actual movement, which can take getting used to, with your legs moving on their own trajectory while you swivel your torso. There is your squad and how they’re deployed, which takes up many of your background thought cycles. And there is your mech, its heating levels, its armor condition, its speed, and everything else you set yourself up for during customization.

Your enemies and your copilots are, well, pretty dumb. There’s good variety in what you face and what you must do, but nobody besides you on the field seems to have a great sense of how verticality works or what the most important thing on the field is at that moment. Once you accept that your squad mates are powerful dummies, you’ll learn to let go of your own mech a bit and spend more time nudging them around or jumping into their cockpits and taking over for a spell.

The nature of mech combat in these games did not, after a half-dozen missions, click with me. On some level, it’s interesting juggling various weapons, positioning yourself with limited movement, and directing teammates. I’m going slow, and it feels like a slog, but I could go faster if I had made a different choice during loadout. I’d just have to make somebody else the heavy.

But it’s also a crunchy simulation game, simulating machinery that does not actually exist. Everything that stands between you and your sense of capable combat is a choice made by the developers.

Mecha culpa

Based on my conversations with longtime MechWarrior fans and reading lots of positive reviews to figure out if there’s something wrong with me, I think MechWarrior 5: Clans is a very juicy offering for mech fans who have been hungry for something new (and especially something set in this Clans-coming-back period) for quite some time. I’m just not entranced as a newcomer, and I’m now thinking something like Armored Core VI would be more my speed if I’m looking for rocking or possibly socking robots. I also didn’t engage with multiplayer at all, so my standard dismissal of combatant AI would only half-apply there.

By all means, though, tell me and each other how this game looks or plays to you. I was not bio-engineered for MechWarrior (I mean, just look at how many contractions I use), but I can still appreciate that it looks pretty good for those who fit better into the chassis.

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frostpunk-2-goes-wider-and-more-political-but-keeps-the-gritty,-stressful-joy

Frostpunk 2 goes wider and more political but keeps the gritty, stressful joy

11 bit studios, city builders, frostpunk, frostpunk 2, gaming, resource management, strategy, strategy games / /

If you had a time machine, would you shoot baby Krakatoa? —

Sequel has yet again made losing your humanity to survive somehow… fun?

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<em>Frostpunk 2</em> has you planning and building districts, rather than individual buildings or roads. You make plans, and a particularly icy god laughs.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/FP2_Launch_Screenshots_Districts-800×450.jpg”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / Frostpunk 2 has you planning and building districts, rather than individual buildings or roads. You make plans, and a particularly icy god laughs.

11 Bit Studios

I can’t remember every interaction I had with the advisers in Civilization games, but I don’t believe I ever had to send my guards to put down a protest one of them staged in a new settlement.

Nor could I ask any of them for “Favours” to scrape a few more heat stamps necessary for a new food district, indebting me to them at some future point when they decide they’ve had enough of some other faction’s people and ideas. In Frostpunk 2 (out today), the people who pop up to tell you how they’re feeling aren’t just helpful indicators, they’re a vital part of the strategy. To keep these people going, you’ve got to make some of them mad, some of them happy, and balance a ledger of all you’ve gained and demanded from them.

That’s the biggest difference you’ll notice in Frostpunk 2 if you’re coming from the original. The original had you making choices that affected people, but you were the Captain, in full control of your people, at least until you angered them enough to revolt. In Frostpunk 2, you manage factions and communities rather than groups of survivors. You place districts, not hospitals. Time moves in days and weeks, not hours. You play multiple chapters across a landscape in a world that is 30 years removed from its initial peril.

The challenge of Frostpunk 2 is no longer simply getting everyone through this winter. There is now some thought of what kind of people you want to be once you have enough fuel, food, and children. Are you in managed decline, or can you build something better, despite the world trying to kill you?

  • You’re still building a city in a radius around the generator, but it’s big hexes and districts, not buildings on grids.

    11 Bit Studios

  • When your city gets built up, it can be mesmerizing to just watch it glow.

    11 Bit Studios

  • Exploring the places beyond your city’s reach can be rewarding, and risky, of course.

    11 Bit Studios

  • Each Faction has their priorities (Cornerstones). You can ask favors, promise things, and track their favor.

    11 Bit Studios

  • A lot of the original Frostpunk feel remains in the game. Should we teach our perfectly pipe-sized kids how to weld inside the oil tubes? What could go wrong?

    11 Bit Studios

A beautiful grid with brutal choices

Those are the big-picture changes to Frostpunk 2. At the ground level, the general feeling is quite familiar. It’s cold, it sometimes gets colder, and there’s a furnace to feed. This time, you need to do “Icebreaking” to unlock tiles for development, but you don’t have to worry so much about the exact placement of individual bits. Your colony or city will link itself up and look beautiful in the game’s grim Victorian cryo-future style. You have to figure out how to scrimp the resources to put an extraction district on the oil reserves, making enough heat for the residents to stop getting sick so you can then send them out to recover goods from a decimated wagon and then icebreak some more toward a food source, all while planning to build a research center and council building.

The research and political trees you climb are more varied and even harder to choose in this sequel. Early in Frostpunk 2, your explorers find a body in the ice with the insignia of the first game’s city on his jacket, and they ask you if it stands for Order or Faith. However you answer, you will have more than just two ideas to choose from. At the base level are two communities, Progress-focused New Londoners and Adaptation-minded Frostlanders. Then you get Order-obsessed Stalwarts, Faithkeepers, and their respective opposition, Pilgrims and Evolvers. Playing the game’s “Utopia Builder” mode after the chapter-based story mode brings in a lot more communities and factions. You know, for this fun thing you do in your spare time.

At the Council Hall, you will need to negotiate with these factions to get votes out of the 100 members, divided up by faction influence. Most votes need 51, but votes that change your power require 66. If a faction is on the fence, you can promise them something, like future research projects or other law changes. Break that promise, and they will work against you in the future. Radicals will show up inside each faction, requiring you to either appease them or find support elsewhere. You can look at all the players and “Cornerstones” (ideologies) at play in one of the game’s beautifully informative screens. You can ponder this while, all around you, the basic needs like fuel, materials, food, and shelter keep needing to be managed.

Your settlers can now lose faith in you not because they’re starving and freezing, but because of political factions. Huzzah!

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Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game

2K Games, 4X, civilization, Civilization VII, Features, firaxis, gaming, strategy / /

One More Turn —

Classic turn-based gameplay meets a radical rethink of the overall structure.

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A Mayan city in Civilization VII

Enlarge / Firaxis has upped the ante on presentation for the cities. It’s still a bit abstract and removed, but they have more vibrancy, detail, and movement than before.

2K Games

2K Games provided a flight from Chicago to Baltimore and accommodation for two nights so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Civilization VII. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.

Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.

Recently, I had the opportunity to play Civilization VII, the next entry, which is due to launch in February 2025. The build I played was an early alpha build, but the bones of the game it will become were there, and it’s interesting to see which third Firaxis kept the same and which third it has reimagined.

It turns out that the core of the game that its developers won’t much want to change is the turn-to-turn experience. But in the case of Civilization VII, all bets are off when it comes to the overall arc of a long journey, from sticks and stones to space travel.

Rethinking the structure of a Civilization game

Most of the time, playing Civilization VII feels a lot like playing Civilization VI—but there’s one big change that spans the whole game that seems to be this sequel’s tentpole feature.

That’s the new Ages system. The long game is now broken into three segments: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Each Age has some unique systems and gameplay, though most systems span all three.

Within each age, you’re given a handful of “Legacy Paths” to choose from. These map closely to the franchise’s long-standing victory conditions: Science, Economic, Cultural, and Military. The idea is that you pick the Legacy Path you want to pursue, and each Legacy Path has different success conditions that change across each of the three Ages.

These conditions are big and broad, and Firaxis thankfully hasn’t gotten too jazzy with them. For example, I played in the Age of Antiquity and pursued the Cultural path, so my goal was to build a certain number of Wonders before the end of the Age.

In some ways, this is similar to the boom-and-bust cycle of Dark and Golden Ages in Civilization VI, but I found it much more natural in VII. In VI, I often found myself making arbitrary-seeming choices I didn’t think made sense for my long-term strategy just to game the system and get the Age transition I wanted. In this new game, the Legacy Path objectives are likely to always be completely in line with the overall victory strategy you’re pursuing.

One of the advantages of this new structure is support for shorter games that aren’t just hyper-compressed versions of a larger game. Previously, the only way to play a game of Civilization that wasn’t a dozen or more hours long was to pick one of the faster game speeds, but that fundamentally changed how the game felt to play.

This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt's Hatshepsut, at the helm.

Enlarge / This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt’s Hatshepsut, at the helm.

2K Games

Now, Civilization VII gives you the ability to play a match that’s just one Age, if you choose to.

The new Ages system is integrated with another big change: your choice of leader and civilization are no longer tied together when you start a new game, and they’re not set in stone, either.

Now you pick both a civilization and a leader separately at the start—and you can do some weird, ahistorical combinations, like Greece’s Alexander as the leader of China. Each leader and civilization offers specific bonuses, so this gives more customization of your playstyle at the start.

It doesn’t end there, though. At the end of each Age, you can essentially change civilizations (though as far as I could tell, you stick with the leader). Firaxis says it took inspiration for this feature from history—like the fact that London was a Roman city before it became an English one in the Medieval era.

Which civilization you can transition to is dictated by what you did within the Legacy Path system, among other things.

The amount of time I had to play the game was just enough to almost finish the Antiquity Age, so I didn’t get to see this in action, but it sounds like an interesting new system.

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Mini Settlers is a city builder that you can both enjoy and actually put down

city builders, gaming, Indie games, mini settlers, SimCity, simulation, strategy / /

You can definitely get 120 frames on an RTX 4080 —

No zoning, no pollution, no advisers—just squares, circles, people, and time.

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Mini Settlers screen showing rocks, fields, and lots of water pumps and farms.

Enlarge / Are you enticed by this kind of orderly madness with a clean graphical layout? Then I suggest you… settle in.

Goblinz Studio

You can’t buy Mini Settlers right now, but I think you should play the free “Prologue” demo and wishlist the full game if you dig it. It’s not quite like any other city builder I’ve played.

Mini Settlers is “mini” like minimalism. It is in the same genre, but quite far from, games like Cities: Skylines 2 (a choice with some proven merit). Your buildings are not 3D-rendered with real-time lighting. Your buildings are colored squares, sometimes with a few disc tokens stacked on them, tabletop-style. Your roads don’t have traffic, but they have drivers (tiny squares) that take resources between nodes. When things go wrong, you don’t get depressing news about pollution and riots; some people just leave their homes, but they’ll come back if you fix what’s wrong.

Mini Settlers announcement video.

Mini Settlers is not the game to play to satisfy your long-running suspicion that urban planning was your missed calling. In the (non-progress-saving) Prologue-free demo out this week, the mines and quarries have infinite resources. There is no “money” to speak of, so far as I can tell. Apple farms must be placed near apple orchards and water pumps by water, and the rest is up to you. The interface looks like a thought experiment in how far you can get from traditional city sim HUDs, but then someone implemented it.

  • A larger-scale view of a developed settlement, one with much better road planning than I achieved.

    Goblinz Studio

  • The game layers information about resources and needs, such that it never feels overwhelming.

    Goblinz Studio

  • Natural resources and land formations require you to work around them in creative ways.

    Goblinz Studio

  • Each circle is a node, and each square is a worker, shuttling resources from node to node, as best they can.

    Goblinz Studio

The biggest challenge I faced in my couple of sessions was textbook logistics, at least from a suburban or small-town perspective. Having developed SimCity Brain throughout prior decades, I tried to keep my residential areas (City Center and the Homes you build around it) away from anything resembling production, like rock quarries and lumber yards. Instead of bolstering housing values or improving aesthetics, which do not exist, this gave me a huge set of supply bottlenecks to try and work through.

Houses wanted regular supplies of apples and water, but spacing out everything made a ton of extra transit work. Every road is a maximum of seven tiles, and each one gets a worker that moves back and forth between waypoints, dropping off goods to buildings or leaving them for the next worker on the goods’ route. I had wanted to create a simple town of people building wood houses and eating apples, and instead, I had a micro-scale Wayfair job interview scenario, complete with tiny warehouses and delivery times.

But, here again, Mini Settlers is different, even when you’re flailing. You simply remove the roads and buildings that don’t work and put them in better places. The buildings take a bit to build again, but there’s no real game timer unless you want to enable one for personal bests. You can even enable a background mode so that the calm simulation keeps running while you absolutely do your best work on a Friday afternoon.

The “Prologue” is not verified for Steam Deck, but the developers have an official layout for it. I think it will do in a pinch, but there’s a lot of thumb-taxing trackpad pointing remaining in a game that seems grid-based enough to do with more gamepad controls. As for performance, it runs great. At 30 frames per second, my Deck guessed it could keep going for nearly five more hours.

Mini Settlers is due out in 2024, seemingly for PC only on Steam, for the moment. The minimum requirements are a Core i3, 4GB memory, and Intel HD Graphics 4000, but “Integrated cards also work.” As the developers at Knight Owl Games note, wishlisting the game helps it circulate inside Steam’s recommendation algorithm, even if you don’t ultimately play beyond the demo. I am going to note a second time here that the demo does not save your game when you exit, which is not another design choice to keep you calm but just a demo thing.

Between this and Against the Storm, I am enjoying the recent broadening of the “city builder” genre. It’s happening, weirdly enough, by going much smaller.

Listing image by Goblinz Studio

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