I'd totally play it with you … If I wasn't moving back to Japan and getting a job next week. I played the first two multiples times with friends, and it was always a blast. But … Business calls.

When I lived in Japan, I had Smash for the Gamecube, and my neighbor and I played together exclusively, being gaijin losers with no other nerd friends. He quickly picked Falco as his main, while I played with a variety of other non-Fox/Falco characters. This did not end well.

I play with a bunch of pretty top-flight board and card gamers, the sort of people who look at a set of rules and pick out exploitable quirks and silly loopholes in minutes.

Any student of warfare will tell you that logistics is half/most of the fight. Having a well-fed, well-rested, and healthy army at the point of battle is both really, really hard and really, really important.

Nice. There's also the "open-world fallacy" baked into every 4x game (thanks to Civ) versus the full-world of the Paradox games.

Robot Odyssey. That needs to be in there somewhere.

Simulationist versus Ludologist approaches to logistics in strategy games.

If they wanted to really change things up, go East. China's Warring States or Three Kingdoms period, or Japan's sengoku area, fit the bill of "chaotic warzone" pretty well. Plus you have kung-fu masters and/or ninjas.

This problem bugged the crap out of me in old space games like Privateer. There were so many pirates in that game, everywhere, all the time, and it was just absurd from any logical standpoint. With so many pirates, how could any trade exist at all? How were they not stronger than the governments and space navies of…

I've often fantasized about using video games in my classes, being a teacher and all, but the problem is the time.

Between MOO2 and MOO3, I was super active on MOO2 community forums, and then on an internet collaborative project to make a 4x game. A little time passed, and then MOO3 came out. Man, was that awful. I gave up when, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to load or unload troops for invasions. This did not…

I don't remember any of those. Odd.

I like doing things the hardest possible way, but I didn't play Ironman on XCOM. I rolled with a lot of punches, and was willing to let soldiers die - but not the WHOLE SQUAD. I'd re-load if I ran into a TPK, or totally failed a mission objective, but otherwise just lived with it. I also restarted the game from…

I'm closing in on the end of the main-plot storyline in Novigrad in Witcher 3. I really like this game.

Entirely true. On the other hand, in Call of Cthulhu, the degenerate cultists were all of … well … less than lily-white backgrounds. One could question the causality - did the worship of Cthulhu lead his cultists to, over generations, become degenerate half-breeds, as he called them more than once, or is Cthulhu…

Though, presumably, the Elder Things could behold their servants without madness. But the Elder Things are infinitely more sympathetic and human-like than the Shoggoth, which are truly and incomprehensibly alien in all ways. Morally, the creation of a slave race is reprehensible, but it may well be a failing of…

Though to be fair, it was commonly believed at the time that mental illness was inherited. He just took the next logical (racist) step.

His monsters also suffered that fate - consider the Elder Things in Mountains of Madness, whose civilization withered and shrank until it was annihilated by the Shoggoths it had created.

Going with the Minutemen, I felt kind of odd at the end. All the factions kinda liked me, but kinda didn't care either, and there was lots of unresolved tension in the air. I kinda of wanted to go and push them around or something, show them who was the big dog now, with my thousands of heavily armed farmers and…

I love game cons. Have fun!