Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zackney.

And you are joining me at the tail end of my vacation, which I am sharing with my pal and regular panelists, Julian Rabbit Murdoch. Hey, how's it going? Not quite evening. A little early to call it evening. But maybe you're listening to this when it's evening. That's true. Well, it's late afternoon. The sun is low in the sky. Right. And so it's a perfect time for gentlemen to sit and talk of strategy and one destruction.

Absolutely.

And we've already been doing a bit of that today.

We have each taken our turn with bombing Germany in a duel in the dark, which is itself a scenario based on the British night bombing campaign against Germany in the later stages of World War II.

And, you know, we've sort of spent a good portion of this weekend, the two of us, talking about, you know, what we want from good scenario design, what, you know, what sort of design challenges, scenario design poses.

So I guess, you know, I wanted to, you know, I wanted to start with, you know, something we

returned to a lot on the show, and you brought up a couple times this weekend, Julian, is

you know, the, I'd say frustrating tendency for a lot of scenarios to sort of turn into a puzzle with very, you know,

wrote paths and, you know, solutions.

Yeah, I mean, and I think that that's somewhat inevitable.

I think particularly when you're dealing with a computer game, right, when you're dealing with a computer game where you've got sort of a limited, limitedly creative AI. I think that's inevitable, right?

Starcraft doesn't become a puzzle to be solved when you're playing competitively versus other

people because the puzzle you're trying to solve is other people, right? And, you know, likewise,

chess isn't a puzzle game when you're playing it against other people. But if you're playing it solo, it, that you play puzzles. That's what you do. You play chess puzzles. And I think that a lot of computer games fall into that pattern. And, you know, we've been playing a lot of war game stuff. And I keep coming back to thinking about Panzer General and Panzer Corps. And how, as much as I love Panzer Corps in particular, I thought that reboot was fantastic, it really is a puzzle game. It really is, here's your limited material, here's what the enemy is going to be laid out like. There's not randomness per se in like how the enemy is going to be deployed. They're sort of set scenarios. And once you sort of cracked it, it's not really all that hard anymore.

Unity of Command, I think, you know, a game we also talk a ton about also has that similar

quality, but I think because the moving pieces, right, the things that you're trying

to suss out are so different than Unity of Command than in a traditional war game.

I'm willing to sort of forgive that.

Plus, I still really suck at it.

So I clearly haven't mastered it or cracked the puzzles well.

Well, I sort of feel like with Unity of Command that there's just enough wiggle room in terms of performance as to in Unity of Command to unlock certain later scenarios, like in Panzer Corps,

...