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During my sophomore year of college, I bought a car with the money I saved working in a 115 degree packaging factory for a summer. A single bus trip was all it took to make me scrap the idea of hanging onto those savings. When the four hour trip from my house to Lawrence University morphed into 10 hours of bus travel, I decided it was worth it to me to spring for a car. At a stroke, a whole new world opened up to me beyond the neighborhood around campus. And a host of opportunities for disastrous misjudgment.

I could go grocery shopping, and when I was out grocery shopping, I could impulse-purchase a copy of PC Gamer in which they reviewed Rome: Total War. And when I read the review of the highest-rated Total War game yet, and saw those glorious, glorious screenshots, it was no trouble at all to cut class, drive to Best Buy, and pick up my own copy.

If I didn’t have a car, I might have had to wait. I might have waited to hear what some of my fellow fans were saying, instead of a magazine that I felt was in serious decline, and which had developed a disturbing habit of publishing suspiciously positive WORLD EXCLUSIVE first reviews.

When I was starting with Rome, I told my friends what an amazing game it was. How it was the best yet. The battles were spectacular, the map was amazing, and I was so glad at how the battlefields changed depending on where you were fighting. It was the best ever!

But I was a Total War veteran, and I started to notice how the AI never seemed to defend its cities, nor finish up a siege against one of mine. I noticed how the enemy would seem to come charging straight across a battlefield at my army, taking a straight line regardless of terrain. I noticed how, after the touch-and-go early game, the AI kept fielding crummy first-tier units against my increasingly powerful and deadly Roman armies. I noticed that it no longer seemed possible to lose in Rome, whereas catastrophe was always just a mis-timed charge away in Shogun or Medieval.

When the Roman civil war broke out, I thought that things were bound to pick up. German primitives, decadent Egyptians, and Macedonian pederasts might not have been a match for my legions, but surely the Roman Republic would give me a run for my money.

Except that it didn’t. I came at them with full stacks of urban and Praetorian cohorts, and they shot back with penny-packets of regular legionary cohorts supported by some ill-advised cavalry charges. All my units had to do was stand there and carve through them until the enemy units broke, as they always would.

Past the earliest stages of the game, there was nothing to keep the game interesting. The AI failed on both levels of the game, and the game’s entire balance was off. Roman primacy was a given unless the incompetent AI was managing them.

Rome marked the start of a lot of bad trends in the Total War series. Inflated review scores and hyperbolic review copy, over-promising and under-delivering from Creative Assembly, ugly fights within the Total War community between the people who couldn’t stomach the flaws and the people who wouldn’t see past the spectacle, and AI that couldn’t play the game.

All those trends persisted through Medieval II and Empire. I was smart enough to predict that Medieval II was going to be a dog, and waited until it went on a hefty discount. But with Empire, credulity got the best of me again. How could it not? I’d just spend two years reading the works of Christopher Duffy and pretty much memorizing every detail of Frederick the Great’s military career. My mind’s eye could see the Prussian grenadiers leaning into the hail of shot and the sheets of flame to storm the Grander-Koppe at the Battle of Soor.

So I found myself at Best Buy on release day grabbing my copy. The Total War games have a knack for short-circuiting my better judgment.

Empire was in far better shape than Rome or Medieval were at release, and probably better than they were even after the last patches came out for them. The AI could deliver a few sound spankings on the battlefield if you weren’t careful. Strategically, it was still very poor. The naval invasion bug, where the AI would simple refuse to load its troops on ships and take them across the ocean, was unfortunate but it’s not like an AI army would have done anything useful once it made landfall.

The more I played Empire, however, the less I thought of it. The Civilization-esque touches proved to be entirely superficial or just plain obnoxious. You couldn’t really do much to affect the character of your cities. Some would be large cities capable of producing advanced units and civic buildings, while others would remain provincial backwaters, good for small tax revenues and little else. Was unrest becoming a problem? Raise more dragoon regiments to keep the Morlocks sufficiently terrified. Then be sure to put up a whorehouse in one of the neighboring villages. In Empire as in other Total War games, prostitution breeds lower-class contentment.

And all the towns could do anything and everything. So you could make a new town into a university, a factory, or a tavern. Whatever you wanted or needed, really. Your call.

Let’s not even discuss the fortress assaults, which are easily the worst in any Total War game.

The gentlemen were useless, except for sending into universities to buff the research rate. You could have them duel with other gentlemen but what, really, was the point of doing that? A coin-toss would decide whether or not Kant helped you invent the steam engine or perished while trying to put a bullet between Voltaire’s eyes. Better to keep him at the university, generating a steady supply of science.

Diplomacy was a tedious mess. Naval combat was ridiculous, exactly the kind of counter-intuitive mess you can expect from a game that has been idiot-proofed. The ships handled without any sense of mass or wind, spinning around like three-masted tops, and whipping broadsides in every direction.

We could go on. Suffice it to say that with Empire, the Chick Parabola was alive and kicking. At first you were curious about its slightly baffling and seemingly interesting mechanics. Then, the more you understood, the hollower was the edifice. Finally, you were left with contempt for the broken features and disinterest in the few rudimentary features that worked.

It took me about 60 hours with the game, maybe a bit longer, to grasp how screwed up it was. Probably far longer than most reviewers had to spend with it. But that’s part of the point, isn’t it? Creative Assembly makes games that are so big and cumbersome that it takes forever to comprehend the whole. Once you do, it all falls apart. But you might convince yourself that you’re playing a good game before that happens.

Creative Assembly have habitually abused the trust of their customers and released buggy, half-finished games packed with ill-conceived features. Then they’ve turned around and whined about how unfair people are being when they get called on it. Or consider this breathtaking post from Mike Simpson over at the Total War Blog. Remember that Empire came out on March 3rd, 2009 in North America, and this post is being written in early October.

I had 6 copies of Empire: Total War sat on my shelf intended for close gamer friends that I didn’t send out because I was too embarrassed about the flaws. Old friends are the harshest critics. Well they’ve gone out now.  I think the game now meets my personal unreasonably high quality threshold – not just good but great. Hopefully my friends will agree.

So the head of the Total War franchise sat on his complimentary copies of Empire because he was too embarrassed to send them to his friends. For seven months after releasing the game to the public and asking $50 a pop. But it’s cool, because this is how SEGA had to play it.

We do however also have another customer who we make the game for, and in one particular way they are the most important of all. It’s our publisher, who is driven by the grim necessity of commercial reality. Those necessities tend to be short term compared with the dev time of a game or the lifetime of a series. They are also necessities that we cannot ignore – if we do it’s Game Over. Empire: Total War happened the only way it could – it had to be in a box in Feb 09.  Damned stressful for all concerned, but it’s so much a fact of life it’s almost not worth talking about.

I think some people think that when “commercial reality” wins, they lose. If the car parks at Sega or CA were full of Ferraris, I might agree. But they are not.  When “commercial reality” wins, we live to make another game.

Got it. Empire had to sell huge exactly according to SEGA’s timeline, regardless of the game’s condition at release. And Total War customers got clued into this eight months after the fact.

I rehash this sad, bitter past because the saga of the up-and-down relationship between Creative Assembly and the die-hard fans it won in 2000 with Shogun is important to how I approach their games now. I don’t have a clean slate with any of their work, and never will. They don’t get the benefit of the doubt, and as far as I’m concerned, they haven’t made a great game since Medieval Total War. They make “decent at best” strategy games with some stunning spectacle attached to them, and that formula has long since worn thin.

This is the attitude I took into Napoleon Total War, and this is why I really do not know what to make of that game. Because having played it for about 25-30 hours, I must reluctantly concede that it’s pretty good. And at times, even great.

I’ll get into that  in another post. But right now, I’m trying to figure out an answer to a comment that Jason Lefkowitz left on Flash of Steel, in response to Troy’s remarks on Napoleon. Jason said:

Here’s what annoys me: buying a game at full retail, finding it to be broken, and then being told by the vendor a year later that I can play the game they promised me back then by paying them again now.

Hearts of Iron 3 was broken as well, but at least Paradox aren’t charging me $35 for the patch. You know?

And I don’t know what we should say to that very good point. Napoleon is a good game, in part because it’s Empire without all the screw-ups and bloat. I’ve played Empire with the 1.5 patch and still find it to be a bit of a dog, but Napoleon is pretty good right out of the box. Empire may never be brought up to this standard.

As a furious consumer, I’m inclined to say that Napoleon should have been free to everyone who bought Empire. We subsidized the development of a good game buy purchasing a bad one, and now Creative Assembly is charging for the “fixed” version. Screw those guys.

But then I consider Napoleon Total War and some of the unexpectedly nail-biting battles and the solid, if not brilliant, action on the campaign map. This is pretty much the game I wanted when I bought Empire. And now that it’s here, I still want it. If it were anyone other than Creative Assembly, and if it were devoid of all this context that I’ve outlined above, I’d say Napoleon Total War is steal at $40. But this expansion brings a longer baggage train than the Grand Armee.

Clear Sky takes place several months before the events of STALKER. This can be rather disorienting and is even poignant at times. Because the Zone as we find it in Clear Sky is not the ruin that you find in STALKER, and the future is a cloud that hangs over the entire game.

The sight that greeted me after a long night of killing

In the Cordon you meet a visionary stalker leader, Father Valerian, who has launched an uprising against the Army and the bandits. Sidorovich dismisses him and his followers as men who are playing at Robin Hood and His Merry Men. You find them set up on a farm north of the railroad embankment, and Valerian speaks of his plans for the future. More stalkers show up every day to join his forces. He has already forced the army out of the Cordon and collected some insurance against their retaking it. Everyone you meet is inspired by Valerian’s rallying cry: the Zone for the stalkers. Soon, he promises, they will begin expanding their control and make the Zone a safe place for honest stalkers.

But we know that when we come to the Cordon in STALKER, the army has a chokehold on the territory and Father Valerian’s fortress-farm is a decaying ruin overrun by wild animals. There will be no traces and no memories of Valerian’s rebellion.

Later, when you come to the Agroprom Research Institute, you find that the Duty faction has made the rambling Soviet structure into a powerful and efficient fortress. The motor pool is full of armored personnel carriers, and a Hind attack helicopter is fueled and ready on the helipad. On the other side of the Zone, in the Dark Valley, the rival Freedom faction has occupied an old maintenance center. Both are running massive, paramilitary operations out of secured strongholds. In STALKER, both these strongholds have become terrifying hell-holes. Agroprom is stripped bare and overrun with mutants when it isn’t being occupied by passing bandit gangs or Special Forces detachments. The Dark Valley is completely hostile, Freedom’s old base fallen into ruin and occupied by a bandit army. The rest of the territory is awash in mutants.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

The Zone in Clear Sky is hardly an Eden, but it is nonetheless headed for a Fall. Everywhere you look you see tomorrow’s ruins. The Clear Sky faction is working feverishly to head off some impending catastrophe. The Duty faction is slowly but surely being ground down by deadly mutant attacks, and Freedom has been ravaged by the work of a traitor in their midst. Valerian is treading close to hubris. Rumors abound of an elite stalker faction that has suddenly vanished. Clear Sky is deliciously full of portent.

Yet its thematic success works against the setting. In the original game, the Zone is a lonely and forbidding land. There are small pockets of relative safety. The rest of the world would prefer to shoot you or eat you. From the time you leave the Stalker village in Cordon until you reach the Duty outpost on the northern end of the garbage dump, you are in mortal danger with every step.

Clear Sky, by contrast, seems crowded, small, and noisy. Everywhere you go, there is a base full of friendly stalkers. Sometimes a base and a couple outposts. You can’t go ten feet without stumbling over a friendly patrol. The dissonance overwhelms the game. In the Dark Valley, you are given a dangerous mission to go kill a pseudodog that has been terrorizing the Freedom base. You go out the back entrance to the base, you walk about one hundred fifty yards, and you’re attacked by the pseudodog. If you turn around, you can still see the guards at the entrance, just standing there chatting while you’re flinging hand grenades and blasting away at spectral wolverines.

When you come down to it, the Zone was never really that big. STALKER seemed expansive because it made you feel small and alone. If safety is a kilometer away and there’s a dozen mortal threats between you and it, that kilometer will seem like the distance between here and the moon. But when GSC packed the Zone full of friendly NPCs in Clear Sky, they called attention to fact that you are playing on a relatively small stage.

To some extent it was inevitable that a second trip to the Zone would begin to feel a bit confined, especially as GSC re-purposed assets from the first game for use in this one. To explore the themes they wanted to in this game, and there are several interesting ones, they had to provide more opportunities to meet other characters and spend time soaking up the different vibes of friendly encampments. There simply are not that many places in this world where you could plausibly have those encounters, and I very much doubt GSC had the resources to create a lot of new, convincing spaces to explore. The Zone is their studio backlot, and sometimes it shows.

On the other hand, there is a lot of tedium in these early encounters. The entire Freedom section should have been scrapped. It brings the game to a screeching halt while the Freedom faction sends you on missions that are the STALKER equivalent of “Run into the gas station and get me some cigarettes.” The encounter with the pseudodog is startling, but everything else is just marking time. The early scenes in Garbage are likewise a waste. It’s not until you reach Agroprom that things start picking up.

Clear Sky has an absolute mess of an opening. The introduction is mishandled and, with the exception of the fighting in the Swamps, it never approaches STALKER for excitement and atmosphere. It seems like Clear Sky doesn’t really care whether or not you keep playing.

But it has a card up its sleeve: Lake Yantar, and a totally unexpected and utterly brilliant zombie apocalypse.

In case you still thought stupidity was in any way a disqualification from being printed on the New York Times op-ed page, let’s a take a look at this gem from Thursday’s paper. A piece from Lara Dadkhah, titled “Empty Skies over Afghanistan”, argues that the US forces have become far too cautious about using air power in the war against the Taliban.

It’s possible she’s right, of course, but her argument  seems naive of basic tenets of counterinsurgency warfare, political philosophy, and military history. You need only have opened a newspaper a few times a year in the last five to know that there are many fine reasons to reduce our dependence on air support. Somehow, Dadkhah and her editors didn’t feel the need to address any of them.

American and NATO military leaders — worried by Taliban propaganda claiming that air strikes have killed an inordinate number of civilians, and persuaded by “hearts and minds” enthusiasts that the key to winning the war is the Afghan population’s goodwill — have largely relinquished the strategic advantage of American air dominance. Last July, the commander of Western forces, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, issued a directive that air strikes (and long-range artillery fire) be authorized only under “very limited and prescribed conditions.”

So in a modern refashioning of the obvious — that war is harmful to civilian populations — the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim.

Astonishing, isn’t it? She dismisses in just a few words practically all of 20th century military history, and the work of countless officers and scholars who have contemplated counterinsurgency warfare. Her piece does not even acknowledge the possibility that she is wrong on this crucial point, and her editors apparently did not feel that an argument like this needed to bother with likely counterarguments. She does not even provide evidence in favor of her claim.

You might be able to make an argument that civilian casualties were irrelevant or even desirable to strategists of antiquity. But I’m not interested in those examples, really, because the rise of mass media in the 20th century has completely changed the importance of civilian casualties. As propaganda has increased in reach and effectiveness, civilian deaths have emerged as one of the most difficult problems a modern military can face.

You could make a strong case that Germany lost World War I because of civilian casualties. Germany’s reputation was irreversibly damaged by the campaign in Belgium, despite the fact that the German troops in Belgium were neither particularly inhumane nor particularly destructive by the standards of that war. Yet the saga of “Brave Little Belgium” cemented Germany’s identity as the vicious aggressor in the European melee.

Unrestricted submarine warfare would ultimately hand Woodrow Wilson the casus belli, partly on the grounds that submarine warfare was a uniquely immoral way to wage war. The innocent victims aboard civilian vessels like the Lusitania proved to be far more consequential than any war material within its hull.

We might also consider the role of civilian casualties in eroding domestic support for a war. It is important to remember that Americans did not turn on the Vietnam War solely because they objected to the draft. As the war dragged on and American firepower was increasingly employed indiscriminately, the war itself began to look less defensible. The US military came out of the war with its reputation a shambles in large part because its prosecution of that war struck many as monstrous.

Then we come to the specific type of war we are fighting right now. Dadkhah’s dismissive reference to “‘hearts and minds’ enthusiasts” is strange considering that the war in Afghanistan is almost universally considered a struggle for the support of the civilian population. In this kind of war, American air power is not a strategic advantage. It is, at best, a tactical advantage. And the tactical and strategic concerns do not always align.

Then she unleashes this statistical observation upon her readers:

While the number of American forces in Afghanistan has more than doubled since 2008, to nearly 70,000 today, the critical air support they get has not kept pace. According to my analysis of data compiled by the United States military, close air support sorties, which in Afghanistan are almost always unplanned and in aid of troops on the ground who are under intense fire, increased by just 27 percent during that same period.

The only way this is a problem is if you believe that the number of close air support sorties should be directly related to the number of troops in the the theater. So if 30,000 troops need 100 sorties a month, 60,000 troops must need 200.

But why should these numbers be locked to a fixed proportion? One of the many, many reasons to employ more troops in a counterinsurgency warfare is so that they are less dependent on supporting fire from air and artillery. An overstretched, undermanned occupation force is going to get into some tough scrapes in which airstrikes are going to be the only way to stave off disaster. A too-small patrol or outpost on the cusp of being overrun needs helicopters and jets to come to the rescue. But a stronger force has the luxury of using less destructive tactics. That’s one of the reasons we sent more troops: to have the luxury of flexibility.

Dadkhah is also sick of all this hand-wringing about civilian casualties, and the ridiculous confluence of moral and strategic concerns that led to tighter restrictions on airstrikes.

Perhaps the directive against civilian casualties could be justified if one could show that Afghan lives were truly being saved, but that’s not the case. According to the latest report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the number of civilian deaths caused by Western and Afghan government forces decreased to 596 in 2009, from 828 the year before. But the overall number of civilian deaths in the country increased by 14 percent, to 2,412, and the number killed by Taliban troops and other insurgents rose by 41 percent. For Afghan civilians who are dying in greater numbers, the fact that fewer deaths are caused by pro-government forces is cold comfort.

There is also little to indicate that the “hearts and minds” campaign has resulted in the population’s cooperation, especially in the all-important area of human intelligence. Afghans can be expected to cooperate with American forces only if they feel safe to do so — when we take permanent control of an area.

This is to willfully miss the point. For one thing, the goal is not to save more Afghan civilian lives but to prevent fewer of them being lost to NATO fire. For Dadkhah, this is an empty and fundamentally hypocritical gesture. If more Afghans are being killed overall, and there’s a chance they could be saved if NATO forces went after the Taliban with every available weapon, then the moral course is to use those weapons. A few more Afghans might die in NATO airstrikes, but more would be saved over all.

The problem is one of human nature. No one who just lost his family to a stray bomb or artillery shell is going to see the big picture that Dadkhah thinks she sees. Most of NATO’s victims would probably decide that NATO is their enemy, and the argument that more Afghans are being saved on the macro-scale is not going to cut it amidst the rubble and the dead. And since the worst mistake you can make in an counterinsurgency is to convince more people to fight you, or at least give tacit support to those fighting you, the planes should stay grounded.

I might also add that her impatience with the “hearts and minds” campaign is premature, to say the least. We botched the war in Afghanistan for 8 years, and among many crucial mistakes we made was an excessive reliance on air power to hit insurgents. The problem is that we frequently did not hit insurgents, just people who looked like insurgents, a group that includes the entire population of Afghanistan. While I personally feel that eight years of screwing up a war is quite enough, I will at least say this for McChrystal: he seems to have some understanding of why we were failing.

Dadkhah concludes with this sober reflection on war.

Of course, all this is not to say that we should be oblivious to civilian deaths, or wage “total” war in Afghanistan. Clearly, however, the pendulum has swung too far in favor of avoiding the death of innocents at all cost. General McChrystal’s directive was well intentioned, but the lofty ideal at its heart is a lie, and an immoral one at that, because it pretends that war can be fair or humane.

Wars are always ugly, and always monstrous, and best avoided. Once begun, however, the goal of even a “long war” should be victory in as short a time as possible, using every advantage you have.

I have no idea what she means by “victory” here. All she has demonstrated is that reducing the number of close air support missions has made tactical success more difficult. Body counts will not bring Afghanistan any closer to stability, and that’s all that airstrikes can give us.

Worse, however, is her dismissal of efforts to make war less monstrous and less ugly. It’s not hypocrisy to spare civilian populations as much suffering as possible. The real lie is to say that war is so inherently horrible that we should give up trying limit it.

(Since I wrote the above, this happened. This is my problem with airstrikes in general: no matter how carefully they are employed, they are fundamentally imprecise and subject to a number of variables. Not only do mistakes like this infuriate the families of the victims, but they also alienate the Afghan and international forces with whom we share an alliance.)