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rob zacny or the podcast on twitter than youâ ve probably already seen that we have a patreon you can follow the link here for more information and iâ ve embedded the video weâ ve done so why patreon first itâ s important to keep in mind that 3ma makes no money and was never really designed to sure we did a couple of donation drives over the last six years but weâ re not big enough to attract advertisers and it was at its birth more a companion to flourishing writing careers it was a way to leverage and popularize our reviews and criticism and expand on things weâ d written elsewhere also for years now many listeners have asked how they can support us we have no subscription program no merchandise idle thumbs helps with mundane costs like hosting spreading the word and sending suggestions have really been all weâ ve asked or expected patreon gives listeners a way to pay for content that they appreciate or value it is i think a good thing 3ma is getting big not serial big but tens of thousands of downloads every week steady growth in listeners it s bigger than i ever anticipated and it has to be done well or we risk losing the respect of our audience but the show takes time â a lot more time than people realize many strategy games take forever to play and itâ s not like 2009 when there were maybe eight or nine interesting strategy games a year we can get six games worth playing in a month now rob is a fulltime freelancer with all the freedom and financial horrors that that job represents he has never let the podcast drop from the top of his priorities but paying work is paying work patreon funds will allow him to not worry that an extra hour or two fitting a full panel onto a schedule is costing him time better spent pitching another article for food or watching more hearthstone matches for research michael hermes our sound engineer has gotten very little from us in the years he has done this even though he makes the podcast a joy to listen to heâ s intimately involved in scheduling and his technical skills mean that the rest of us can mostly relax on that front but he is a professional and should be compensated for using his skills read more comments off on the three moves ahead patreon 13 shows that make the case tags what i ve learned after 300 episodes of three moves ahead march 31st 2015 by troy goodfellow three moves ahead we ve just published the 300th episode of three moves ahead rob zacny bruce geryk tom chick and i take a look at a cool little vietnam war themed game it s not your typical wargame it heavily abstracts the important political stuff that you need to pay attention to and the map is random you are not pushing counters anyway we liked it tom and bruce loved it but i m not here to talk about vietnam 65 i m here to talk a bit about the podcast and how it has grown and changed we don t publicly release precise numbers but to give you an idea of how big the show has grown from its start the earliest shows have total lifetime downloads that new shows more than double on release day our top show in march has five times the downloads of our oldest podcasts that have been available for six years now that march episode will continue to be downloaded for many more months rob and sean sands talking about europa univeraslis iv in 2015 is now our third most downloaded show ever it came out in january so i can confidently say that our audience has never been larger our preparation has never been better and our growth seems to be steady after a real explosion in the 2013 2014 period and no we still don t make any money doing it though idle thumbs paying for our hosting and our forum is a huge thing 300 shows is a lot and i probably never expected it to go on this long rob has now been lead chair twice as long as i ever was i ceded the seat to him in episode 100 and under his direction we ve had a lot of great panelist and discussions a bit of history here when i started 3ma in 2009 i invited two friends that had similar interests bruce and tom and an experienced podcaster that i greatly respected julian murdoch we were the starting panel and tom was good enough to let me use the forum at quarter to three to promote the show while we were getting things sorted we eventually stopped doing that but it gave us an audience foundation to work with we invited rob on some time in 2010 because scheduling issues meant we needed another body on the show stat and though he wasn t someone i would have even called an acquaintance at that point just a young writer i really really liked we grabbed him and he was excellent that gave tom some freedom to leave the show and start his own game podcast yada yada yada anyway the point is the way the show looks now is very different from how it was conceived if you look at those early shows for example we did more thematic stuff it s been long enough that we might want to revisit those themes now that steam makes it so much easier to get codes for almost every major pc strategy game though we can focus on games like say grey goo which has also been an oddly popular show so a few things i have learned in creating and advising on three moves ahead the caveat of course is that rob really runs things but i still have ideas warning this is a long post with no pictures read more 7 comments tags prepare ye the way of the lord march 19th 2015 by troy goodfellow religion when i heard that my old friend rod humble was making a game about the spread of religions i knew i was going to be playing it rod has always had an interesting approach to game design almost more interested in posing questions whether about history or emotional connection in games and i had high hopes that cults and daggers would be the same sort of mind twisting self reflective sort of game that i came to expect from him of course when you re selling a game on steam for 30 dollars there are limits to how out there you can go and cults and daggers is ultimately a quite conventional territory control game that uses persuasion and secrecy instead of armies it s underdocumented i m not sure exactly what wars do or what happens to the map between ages and the ui is a mess but it does have interesting ideas and a quite old fashioned style of play some people have been able to use its thin religious veneer to reconnect with their personal ideas of faith i was never able to make that leap it s probably not surprising that i couldn t quite connect with it religion in games is generally a matter of special buffs or general harmony in civilization iv a multifaith empire that controlled all the holy cities was an unstoppable force of culture and gold in civilization v you pick generic religious beliefs if you found a new faith but the most powerful ones are again related to bringing in gold or special buildings our games at paradox the crusader kings and europa universalis series give every religion an attribute or two that usually give you bonuses or new game experiences but dominions is about becoming a god not founding a religion the temple in rise of nations expands your boundaries and increases tax income but is not a building of faith so the more i think on it the more i think that cults and daggers is not about faith at all it might be about religion but it s really about fear read more 2 comments tags a few thoughts on city builders and end games january 14th 2015 by troy goodfellow city builder it s been a long time since i ve published a design meditation let s see if this brain still works after a year of not blogging i like city builders i will play a wider range of incomplete and ill thought city builders than i will of almost any other strategy genre and we all know how full of ill thought ideas strategy gaming is i won t stick with most of these games for very long city builders are exceptionally hard to do well because a rewarding city builder is deep and complex but also makes it easy to find out what is going wrong in your city even if there is no easy way to fix it i ve played a few different indie city building games in the last year the rather rough but enchanting banished the terrifying but only anticipated clockwork empires the seemingly unsure of itself folk tale the light and tablet born 1849 and there s hearthlands which i have just started playing but it looks charming and 1997 ish folk tale somewhere that s green city builders are at their core puzzle and math flow games i ve often derided this on the podcast since i have very little interest in solving for x when i should be keeping my residential and industrial sectors properly separated by orchards and parks but each map and each scenario generally has a problem to solved that varies from game to game even as one variable remains almost always constant simcity is about taxes not food but food is the most important thing in caesar read more 6 comments tags blinded by the beauty of our weapons january 12th 2015 by troy goodfellow civil war me it s probably no secret that i love ultimate general gettysburg given how much i raved about it on the podcast last summer and again in the end of year show rob zacny put together a nice tribute to it as a surprise favorite of 2014 for a more cautious but fair recommendation check out matt richardson s review richardson is especially on point when he talks about how it sometimes feels like ugg degenerates into blobs with no clearly defined lines your troops get all messed up together and yes it can be rough to keep everyone straight and god i love keeping everyone straight you wouldn t know it by looking at my apartment i am a bit of a slob in many areas but i really like my soldiers lined up in perfect little rows as they march forward to be shot in pike shot i will hold up a too far ahead tercio because i want my reserve guys to line up beside it for aesthetics as much as utility in field of glory i will try to make both my flanking charges envelop the enemy at the same time and will get quite annoyed when someone doesn t sit still and let me hit them from behind a suboptimal road connection in civilization v is definitely not on i would probably be a better combat mission player if i weren t so hung up on elegance i know my close combat play suffers from too meticulous attention to building enfilade fire zones for advancing wehrmacht and don t get me started on my city building problems now historically some of this stuff would make sense civil war rifles were certainly better than most napoleonic muskets but the cloudy smoke of the battlefield and power of mass fire still meant that you wanted to stick near your standard and your troop mates the near impossibly perfection of cannae is still studied today because its deadliness is attributable to that amazing beauty of timing co ordination and precise planning ultimate general gettysburg doesn t give me the tools to keep my lines together or advancing as synchronized units you drag the unit with your mouse and where it ends up it ends up and that often means overlapping the next brigade over and ocd generals across pennsylvania start freaking out in the end it doesn t matter a lot for my enjoyment it s a great game and i have been known to find great beauty in imperfect things people for example ugg manages to get by with a lot of other civil war colour so my failure to make pickett s charge look like anything other than a bunch of college kids storming a football field can be forgiven the colours the maps the sounds the various historical possibilities please use the comments to share your own gaming pathologies i can t be the only weirdo out there 7 comments tags some thoughts on cryptic comet january 5th 2015 by troy goodfellow cryptic comet design the news that vic davis is abandoning computer game design to focus on board games isn t that much of a surprise his western card game six gun saga can be easily imagined as a cardboard and plastic material object his first game armageddon empires was a deck building hex based wargame and his multiplayer masterpiece solium infernum looked like a boardgame even though there were so many things to manage that it s nearly impossible to imagine anyone finish a faithful facsimile in their living room i ve played all of vic s games and enjoyed them all vic was the first guest on three moves ahead episode 1 is no longer available because julian s mic wasn t working and a lot of the conversation is lost my glowing review of solium infernum for crispy gamer is now lost to the vagaries of website shutdowns but i should see if i still have a copy somewhere so even though i understand vic s decision to move to boardgames boardgames are hot right now he already has the mind for them his choice of development language seems have been a poor one i m can t help but be disappointed vic davis is one of those developers with an unerring sense of theme every mechanic and every bit of art buttressed the idea that games can be though they certainly don t have to be escapist in the best sense a means to translate the soul to a new world for a few hours solium infernum i think stands out for me because its theme of demons competing to reign in hell is so unique that even people with no head for convoluted strategy games got sucked into play by email matches there was a built in unfairness to a lot of the systems and how you build your starting demon can mean everything or nothing if the map and avenging angels had a say in how the game progresses it s a game made for chat rooms and secret deals using cards as blue shells to simply stop whomever is winning and damn the rest vic has always been a friend of the blog and a friend of the podcast you can listen to him talking about solium infernum in episode 41 and six gun saga on episode 120 3 comments tags previous entries search it recent entries the three moves ahead patreon 13 shows that make the case 10 27 what i ve learned after 300 episodes of three moves ahead 3 31 prepare ye the way of the lord 3 19 a few thoughts on city builders and end games 1 14 blinded by the beauty of our weapons 1 12 some thoughts on cryptic comet 1 5 2014 the year i had lots to say elsewhere 12 30 visit gerykville 5 5 age of bronze men of stone part one 1 5 2013 the year of everything and nothing 12 31 visit the archives for more gaming blogs acid for blood andrew hayward bruce geryk s wargame page buttonmashing cake pie cathode tan chewing pixels corvus elrod dan amrich dubious quality fidgit game politics game set watch gay gamer illuminating games improbable insights jenn cutter leigh alexander mike kreuzer mile zero old wizard out of eight reviews richard cobbett rob zacny rock paper shotgun sportsgamer tales of a scorched earth tea leaves the angry bear allen rausch the border house the nut and the feisty weasel the slowdown twerkface inc uk gamer veteran gamer what would matt do yehuda s board game blog zone of influence developer blogs brad wardell brenda brathwaite brett douville 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