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

With me today are two of my regular panel. First, we have Three Moves Head founder and strategy expert, Troy Goodfellow.

Troy, welcome to the show.

I'm an expert again. Yay! I'm glad to be here.

Sorry, hang on, PR Flack. I'm sorry. I meant that.

And we also welcome back, freelance writer, Julian Murdoch. Hello, hello. And finally we welcome back our old friend game designer Dave Heron. Hi, thanks a lot. It was a semi-regular panelist at this point. We have a lot of them. Semi-regular panelist. Yeah, it's... I'll take what I can get. Oh, it's a good thing. It's a good thing. Our bench is getting deeper and wider all the time. It's awesome. And, you know, I mean, really, you outranked Soren Johnson, who's still just an ex-intern. Wow. So, way to go, Dave. So today we're going to be talking about acts of God and major disruptive events in strategy games. I guess you could almost call

this the germs part of the guns, germs, and steel, you know, Trinity. But the thing that put

it put me in mind of it was an article that was being passed around Twitter the other day

about the plague in Justinian Byzantium,

which kind of put paid to a lot of the Eastern Roman Empire's reconquest of the Western Empire.

And it just got me thinking about the sheer number of times you find major events like an unexpected plague, a famine,

something like that, sort of changing the strategic landscape really swiftly, really suddenly, and really playing havoc with the

ability of rulers and great leaders to plan and react effectively. And it got me thinking

that for all that, you know, strategy games tend to

prize historical realism and such, a lot of them really don't want to touch major disruptive events

with a 10-foot pole. There's very few strategy games that I can think of that really can have the

entire game suddenly radically altered by a plague.

And I kind of want to talk about why that is.

I think the first answer is rather obvious, is you don't want to have, if games are about systems,

understanding systems, and mastering systems, you don't want to have a player's hours of work completely undone by,

oh, sorry, some flea just showed up in your port, and all your armies are dead.

So there's that resistance to having the type of randomness or historical, oh my God,

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