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

Joining me tonight, we welcome back to old friends. First, Ironwall Games, Rob Davio.

Rob, welcome back to the show. Thank you very much. And we also welcome back, former intern, now the lead

designer of Mohawk games, Soren Johnson. Hey, guys. Great to be here. So if we're getting to today's topic, a quick story.

Just years ago, there was this ad for the first age of empires, and it was one of the best

strategy game ads I've probably ever seen.

It was a three-page ad, which kind of tells you everything about that era in games media,

right?

It was glory days of the, you know, 300-page issues of PC gamer.

But anyway, so you had this three-page Age of Empires ad,

and nobody really knew what the hell the game was going to be yet.

And so you'd hit the first page, and it was this really gorgeous, glorious-looking,

like, classical Greek city, you know,

white marble columns, temples, you know, paved streets. It was beautiful. And, you know, the text on

this first page was like, you know, art, culture, literacy, your civilization is thriving. What

more could you possibly ask for? And you turn the page,

and on the right-hand side, you've still got that same glorious Greek city, except now the full

screenshot is unveiled. And on the left-facing page, you have an army burning down the walls,

pouring into the city streets, workers being slain in the streets. And the text was,

at this point, an army would be useful. And that really kind of sums up, I think, this weird

tension in a lot of strategy games that combine construction of an empire and then also the other

things empires do, which is project power and fight.

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