KickStarter Jon Shafer's At the Gates

[Beowulf]

Lets wait for the review and see how buggy the launch is.

I must confess, that despite all the reservations and concerns, I'm tempted to try it at some point.
Sooner than later.

 

[Makabb]

Released ?

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/01/23/jon-shafers-at-the-gates-review/

Wot I Think: Jon Shafer’s At The Gates

“Winter is coming!” yell the tiny minions in At The Gates as they flee, incredibly slowly, back to the safety of their settlement. They don’t actually yell that, but in my head that’s what I imagine they’re shouting as their little health bars tick down underneath the message ‘SUPPLIES EXHAUSTED’. I also imagine them clutching frost-bitten hands to their chests as they trump miserably through the snow, occasionally collapsing from sheer tiredness, the welcome hearth fires of home so close, yet so achingly far.

Sadly, imaginary scenes like this were far more exciting than the actual process of playing the game. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Jon Shafer was the lead designer on Civilization V, and he’s been quietly toiling away on the Kickstarted At The Gates for years. In a touch that made me smile, the full name of the game is actually Jon Shafer’s At The Gates, revealing not only personal pride in this pet project, but also sticking one in the eye of Sid Meier. “Eat that, Sid!” I imagine Jon, yelling into the night, shaking his fist at trees. “You’re not the only one who gets to have his name in the title!”



Jon’s lovingly crafted 4X strategy game takes the world-spanning ethos of Civilization and focuses it down to a more human level of collecting wood and picking berries. In that sense it shares a lot of DNA with The Settlers, albeit with a turn-based structure rather than real-time shenanigans. Your tribe is plonked onto a procedurally generated landscape circa 400 AD, with the goal of taking down the mighty Roman Empire. But that goal is a long way off. No, let me correct that, it’s a looooooooooong way off. That’s more like it.

A cheerful note from Jon in the review build warns “At The Gates is a hard, slow game”, and he’s certainly not kidding about the slow part. Each turn takes roughly half a month, and you’re very limited in what you can do in that time. You start with three clans, each represented by a chunky figure that towers over the landscape, and you can move each of them up to three hexes – as long as they’re not going over hills or streams, in which case their movement is reduced.



You can also study a profession – or in other words, unlock branches of the tech tree. The base-level professions, like Gatherer or Hunter, only take one turn to unlock, but the top branches can take up to 25 turns to research – and you can only research one profession at a time. Similarly, you can train one clan per turn in either a profession or discipline. The higher the clan’s discipline level, the quicker it is for them to train in a related profession. So for example, it might normally take five turns to train a Farmer, but if your clan has a couple of discipline levels in Agriculture, it might only take three. However, if you want to switch your clan’s discipline later on, say from Agriculture to Metalworking, their discipline level goes back to one.

Because you can only train one clan, only research one profession at a time, it takes an absolute age to get anything done. I was three hours into my first game before I even contemplated building a farm, for example. This isn’t helped by the clans’ painfully slow movement. On one occasion my Explorer spotted a fruit bush on the outskirts of my map, and it took nearly two in-game months for my Gatherer to reach it and start picking. And if you stumble across an ‘unidentified’ resource, it takes four turns to ‘identify’ it, which just seems like a needless waste of everyone’s time. I pictured my Gatherer stood staring at an ‘unidentified plant’ for weeks, scratching her head and rubbing her chin, occasionally breathing in sharply through her teeth.



Then there’s the fact that when winter arrives, almost everything stops. I actually like this. The cold snap has a big impact, so crop-harvesting ceases, and exposed clans either have to rush back to the safety of the settlement or ‘encamp’ where they are to preserve their health and eke out their survival on dwindling supplies. It’s imperative to have enough food stored up to see your tribe through the winter, otherwise you’ll have to rely on rare visits from the goods caravan to buy fresh supplies. But this seasonal halt to proceedings does tend to make an already slow game even slower.



Resources are very limited, in keeping with the hardship of the Dark Ages, I suppose. But you’re also limited in the number of clans you can have. Clans arrive every few turns in accordance with the ‘fame’ level of your settlement, but the maximum number is 40. So even if you manage to unlock all of the jobs on the extensive tech tree, which range from Miner to Archer to (my personal favourite) Ale Maker, you’re only going to have enough people to do a handful of jobs. This means you need to retrain clans in different professions as the game goes on. But retraining also means plodding the clan in question all the way back to your settlement first. And you can only have one settlement, so that trip might be a very long one indeed. OH MY GOD IT TAKES SO LONG TO DO ANYTHING IN THIS GAME.

If you want to have any hope of taking down the other tribes across the map, a big chunk of your clans will be in the army. Yet in contrast to the amount of time it takes to train soldiers, combat is brutally swift. It took me several in-game months to assemble my first band of warriors, yet when I sent them out against a rival, they were wiped out in one turn. As you can imagine, my howls of frustration were plaintive.



At The Gates has an impressively complicated set of interlocking systems, but the amount of time and patience it takes to actually get anywhere is ridiculous. Civilization is hardly a rip-roaring roller-coaster ride, but the key difference is that your decisions in Civilization feel momentous. By contrast, At The Gates feels like a slow war of attrition against mundanity. Rather than making decisions like ‘Should I press on and take territory from Gandhi’s empire or concentrate on building my naval fleet?’, you’re faced with choices such as ‘Should I go and see what that bush is over there or explore a bit further to find some cows?’.

“At The Gates is a hard, slow game.” You’re not wrong, Jon.

 

[covr]

Should be released any minute from now. First reviews are out and they are not very good. It seems that game is lacking AI (literally, AI does nothing, it is not there), diplomacy and religion is simple as fuck. Other features are quite great, though.

 

[Infinitron]

Oof: https://www.pcgamer.com/at-the-gates-review/

AT THE GATES REVIEW
Walk your barbarian hordes through the gates of Rome.

It was wine that finally took down the Romans. At the Gates is a 4X game where victory is only achieved if you conquer either the Eastern or Western Roman Empire, and facing what at first seemed like insurmountable odds, I turned to alcohol. It funded my war machine, kept the clans happy and the grapes fed everyone during winter food shortages. My burgeoning barbarian kingdom owed everything to its vineyards. That and the extremely sleepy AI.

My boozy realm was initially born out of necessity. At the Gates draws from a lot of different sources, from Civilization—designer Jon Shafer was the lead designer of Civilization 5—to worker placement games such as Agricola, but like a survival game, it’s driven by harsh weather and resource scarcity. When you find a large source of food (or booze) you make the most of it.

Every playable barbarian faction is limited to a single city. Expansion is largely done by plonking down watchtowers or fortifying buildings outside of the settlement, and it’s usually with a specific resource in mind. My thirst for the delicious grape led me to expand north, building more vineyards there, but when they dried up, my workers moved on and the borders retreated. The barbarian kingdoms are agile, adaptable up-and-comers, in contrast to the inflexible Roman powerhouse.

At least they are when there’s a player running the show. Otherwise, the barbarians seem pretty content to do very little at all, aside from pointlessly moving troops around within their own borders. The Saxons to my south, for instance, started out more developed—the starting situation is purposefully unbalanced—but then never expanded or built anything new.

Instead of managing an empire, you’ll spend most of your time managing people. Clans do everything. Each is a single unit that can be assigned jobs that run the gamut from winemaker to priest. Instead of the research tree being full of inventions and concepts, it’s full of professions, which in turn unlock new resources, tools and buildings. They’re at the centre of everything, so putting people in the right job is a big part of running a kingdom. Being a barbarian monarch, it turns out, is a lot like working in recruitment.

It’s a bit more complex than just finding a hairy barbarian, giving them a briefcase and sending them on their way. People are often abstract concepts in 4X games, distilled down to a simple resource or disposable units, but At the Gates’ clans have some welcome humanity, reflected by their traits, both positive and negative, and desires. Some of my clans decided that they would much rather work inside the settlement, and they grew upset the longer they went ignored. In fairness, the clans were working in the snow.

Winter’s generally a bad time. Crops die, buildings close down, and people stop moving and start moaning. If you’ve prepared, you’ll get through it, and if you haven’t, you’ll struggle, but there’s not really much you can do during winter. You’ve just got to wait it out, which isn’t the most thrilling activity, and unfortunately it lasts for several turns.

Amid the familiar crises like your farms not producing enough food, there are problems with less clear solutions, like your two best spearmen units suddenly becoming mortal enemies. There’s a lot of juggling to do as you try to keep everyone happy and in the role that’s appropriate for them. Training them in a new job is as straightforward as sending them back to the settlement and waiting for a few turns, so there’s a lot of room for experimenting with different worker loadouts, while miserable clans can be cheered up with booze. My starting location paid off again.

Despite being a more human 4X, you’re still trying to create an efficient machine. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve gleefully celebrated squeezing another 1.5 food out of my farms. The final objective might be the conquest of Rome, but the path to get there is much more evocative of a tycoon game, full of worker micromanagement and manufacturing chains. Every resource has an industry just waiting to spring up around it, and though it’s the beginning of the Dark Ages, it looks like getting rich is still the fastest route to success.

Get a bit of cash in your pocket and all your worries about resource shortages will wash away, along with a lot of reasons to keep playing. Gathering up massive piles of gold is a lot easier than producing enough food to feed all of your clans, too. With only the occasional gold mine and one trade building, I was set for life.

With my fat bank account, I was able to go on shopping sprees every time the caravan pulled up to the settlement. There’s no trade between the factions—interactions are limited to declaring war and making alliances that, as far as I can tell, don’t do anything—so this caravan is the only way to buy things. Its stock is random, but as it visits several times a year, I was usually able to get everything on my shopping list. The caravan also buys goods, and you better believe I shifted a lot of wine. It’s exploitable, too, so buying and reselling the same item over and over again nets you a profit, though I was never so hard up that I was tempted to use it.

Without adversity, At the Gates is a pretty straight line to Rome. Or Constantinople, if it’s closer. There are two ways to win: conquer one of the Roman capitals or take them over peacefully. The latter is framed as an economic victory because it costs quite a lot of money, but it also involves a lot waiting around, doing nothing for turn after turn. The money is better spent on equipping soldiers and sending them to kill Romans, which is exactly what I did. It was uneventful.

My sauced up warriors—the wine helped with morale—marched across the world and, finally within the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire, proceeded to conquer every city one at a time. Every single legion stayed behind the walls of its respective city. The other factions acted with equal indifference to my sieges. All it would have taken to crush my invasion was one tiny bit of teamwork, but they just sat there, passively waiting for the end, which came swiftly and unceremoniously.

That was the thing that I'd been working towards all this time, but there was no satisfaction and no resistance. When the AI can't even try to defend itself, it doesn't seem ready for launch. And that's just the most game-breaking of the issues, which also include pretty frequent crashes when trying to load a game and units occasionally not being able to attack buildings during a war.

The ability to buy your way out of most problems and passive AI make it feel like you’re taking advantage of an exploit even when you’re playing it normally. At the Gates’ challenge is meant to be a hook, with it even sharing the roguelike philosophy of teaching through failure, but none of that was apparent as I walked my hordes to victory. It undermines the survival elements and the whole underdog premise, leaving At the Gates with a bunch of novel 4X ideas that quickly fizzle out.

THE VERDICT
57

AT THE GATES
Passive AI and a flawed economy ruin what could have been a refreshing 4X experiment.

 

[Agame]

Should be released any minute from now. First reviews are out and they are not very good. It seems that game is lacking AI (literally, AI does nothing, it is not there), diplomacy and religion is simple as fuck. Other features are quite great, though.

Hardly surprising AI is bad, one guy making a 4X game? Something has to give. Its a shame as that really puts me off the game. I wonder if its something he will work on post release?

 

[Beowulf]

Those early reviews actually make want to buy this Aggressors 4x from Matrix. Apparently diplomacy and AI are quite good for the genre.

 

[Zed]

It's a shame it's getting panned. I was pretty hype for this. I don't mind if it's a slow game, but I don't like absent AI. Maybe something to pick up in a future sale...

 

[GrainWetski]

It's a shame it's getting panned. I was pretty hype for this. I don't mind if it's a slow game, but I don't like absent AI. Maybe something to pick up in a future sale...

It's good that it's getting panned. Getting praised by PC Gamer and RPS is the most damning thing I can imagine.

Sight, sound, and systems harmonize to make Civilization 6 the liveliest, most engrossing, most rewarding, most challenging 4X in any corner of the earth.

 

[Frusciante]

I’m still thinking about buying it just to support the dude. I appreciate how he sort of dug himself out of the hole he was in. And hopefully the game will improve with patches further down the line.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Oh, strategy reviews from the same publications who claimed Into The Breach has more depth than chess and that Frostpunk is a game with relentless brutal difficulty.

 

[flyingjohn]

I don't think it is good to get panned din the "ai is no challenge" category from people who can't even master peggle.

This is typical Shafer, a lot of systems that just don't work together coupled with a ai that can't play the game.You can see it in his civ mods and especially in civ v vanilla.

Also i fail to feel sorry for somebody who was given constant choices in life and employments and still failed miserably.He choose to leave all those companies because of his stubbornness.

 

[Hoggypare]

Well, I saw it is a game set in Late Antiquity, so I bought it. Simple as that.
After a couple of hours I will say that what was said above is more or less true. It is unfinished, AI has a headstart but later doesn't do much. However, for all what that is worth I am kind of enjoying it. Comparisons to Civ games really puzzle me - it rather reminds me of "Colonization". It is focused heavily on economy and striving for efficiency in a resource chain, and that system alone is quite well done as well as very interesting. Another thing that keeps me playing is the feel of the times. It depicts Dark Ages very well - At first, your economy is based on gathering, highly inefficient and depleting the surrounding resources, You are encouraged to migrate seeking new, richer lands, to finally establish a kingdom, and making a more permanent economy. This might push You to war with other tribes. The ultimate goal is to conquer Rome, or to become a MVM by letting the empire use Your tribesmen as legionaries. Selection of tribes is also nice.
I can see it has glaring flaws, but it is like wanting to play soldiers as kids. You would like this cool plastic M4 that makes sounds when You pull the trigger, but all You have is a stick. Now, it is a pretty neat stick, it even has a branch that kind of looks like a pistol grip, but in the end, it is a stick, and whether you enjoy it depends entirely on how much You want to enjoy it.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Those early reviews actually make want to buy this Aggressors 4x from Matrix. Apparently diplomacy and AI are quite good for the genre.

They are, but it's more or less a pure war / map painting game.

 

[Jeff Graw]

I don't think it is good to get panned din the "ai is no challenge" category from people who can't even master peggle.

Yet if the AI is really good people will crucify you for that too.

I think it's possible to eat your cake and have it too -- eg. dynamically scaling AI that adapts to journos or pros, and excellent game design that makes the right decision also the role-play-ey immersive one -- it's just extremely difficult.

 

[kris]

I don't think it is good to get panned din the "ai is no challenge" category from people who can't even master peggle.

Yet if the AI is really good people will crucify you for that too.

I think it's possible to eat your cake and have it too -- eg. dynamically scaling AI that adapts to journos or pros, and excellent game design that makes the right decision also the role-play-ey immersive one -- it's just extremely difficult.

"People"? Game journalists are not people.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I think it's possible to eat your cake and have it too -- eg. dynamically scaling AI that adapts to journos or pros, and excellent game design that makes the right decision also the role-play-ey immersive one -- it's just extremely difficult.

This would be something akin to what the German car industry did. If the software thought, that the car was on a test stand, the emissions were reduced.

But I agree, that the majority of players don't want a strictly competitive (e.g. chess computer like) AI. They want a fun AI.

 

[Beowulf]

Yet if the AI is really good people will crucify you for that too.

Any examples?
I've never heard of a 4x game (or strategy game, fo that matter) that would get complaints becouse the AI is too good at playing the game.
Sure, people (reasonably, IMO) complain when the AI opponent is too hard becouse of all the bonuses it receives.

Games like Command Ops actually get praise becouse the AI is actually decent. Nobody will "crucify" the developer for creating something good.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Yet if the AI is really good people will crucify you for that too.

Any examples?
I've never heard of a 4x game (or strategy game, fo that matter) that would get complaints becouse the AI is too good at playing the game.
Sure, people (reasonably, IMO) complain when the AI opponent is too hard becouse of all the bonuses it receives.

Games like Command Ops actually get praise becouse the AI is actually decent. Nobody will "crucify" the developer for creating something good.

A good / humanlike AI would do a lot of things, which many players dislike. That includes gratuitous backstabbing even when on friendly terms and other stuff. For example many people dislike if a friendly AI turns on them, even if it's the only logical move to prevent the player from completing a winning condition.
The AI in CIV 6 was criticized for being "unreadable" and "random" (e.g. attacking you, even if you have great relations) - but any competitive human player is unreadable and exploits any weakness. But many players don't like it, if their AI "friends" attack them out of nowhere, even if it's a logical move.

 

[flyingjohn]

Yet if the AI is really good people will crucify you for that too.

Any examples?
I've never heard of a 4x game (or strategy game, fo that matter) that would get complaints becouse the AI is too good at playing the game.
Sure, people (reasonably, IMO) complain when the AI opponent is too hard becouse of all the bonuses it receives.

Games like Command Ops actually get praise becouse the AI is actually decent. Nobody will "crucify" the developer for creating something good.

A good / humanlike AI would do a lot of things, which many players dislike. That includes gratuitous backstabbing even when on friendly terms and other stuff. For example many people dislike if a friendly AI turns on them, even if it's the only logical move to prevent the player from completing a winning condition.
The AI in CIV 6 was criticized for being "unreadable" and "random" (e.g. attacking you, even if you have great relations) - but any competitive human player is unreadable and exploits any weakness. But many players don't like it, if their AI "friends" attack them out of nowhere, even if it's a logical move.

People hate modern civ ai because it is suicidal and annoying,not because random.
In civ v liberated civs will declare war on enemies even if they don't have any armies.
In civ 6 ai will declare war on you because you didn't build enough boats even though you are landlocked or some other stupid thing with their agenda.

A smart ai would never attack a superior enemy directly,it would choose a victory type based on what the best player in the game neglected.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I didn't want to claim that the Civ 6 AI was (doing these things, because it was) smart.

I still think that most people prefer an AI which "feels" good (by acting like no human player would), not one which is purely competitive.

 

[Alpan]

I think Jon Shafer is a vastly overrated designer, but it might be prudent to reassess what this game looks like in a year or two. Guy went crazy (like another indie dev I know) but actually managed fix himself up and release the game, albeit in an unfinished state (unlike the other dev). Obviously he knows about the shortcomings, and will likely work to fix them.

 

[Hoggypare]

I have the impression that the whole concept of making AI opponents for this game is a bad idea. AI does well in strategy games where there is a lot of math involved and the concepts are very much abstracted - wargames would be a decent example (especially those that have more indirect player input). Now, the more intertwined systems and possibilities You have, the worse the AI gets. This is a huge hurdle to get over if You want to innovate in the slightes in the 4X genre. Look at another great example of an innovative game, that has simply braindead AI - Endless Legend. And Amplitude is no one guy making an indie project.
In AtG You have dozens of different resources that interact and are needed for various things. You also have professions that let You specialize and maximize efficiency. I can't imagine what kind of unholy algorithms could understand what to do at certain points in the game, since at all time it 'depends'. And on many different factors, availability of resources, skills of clans, your focus on research etc. I would be more happy if they went the route Thea did, and made the game of You (and Your tribe) against the world. The challenge would be much better, if there were some good scripts providing it. That would be the way to go instead of focusing on developing a gimped AI that in a million years wouldn't be able to play the same game You do. Especially that the setting is kind of assymetrical, with WRE and ERE being completely different factions than other barbarians.

 

[Jeff Graw]

Any examples?

I haven't actually played it, but Pandora: First Contact (post AiL patches at least) is a commonly cited example.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, the AI in newer Civilization games isn't necessarily harder than Civ 4. It just plays in a manner that makes all the diplomatic and political systems feel fake.