Great moments in PC gaming are little tidbits of some of our favorite gaming memories.
“Painting the map” gets a bad rap among some players, and becomes synonymous with the kind of strategy game where it’s the only thing you can do. Which, of course, can be boring. If there are no opportunities for politics and diplomacy, no interesting alliances or trade negotiations or paths that don’t involve building a bigger army than the other guy over there and taking his land by force, it’s boring. But it doesn’t have to be.
When done right, map painting is half the fun of Civilization, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, most of the Total War series, and many of Paradox’s games – any time a strategy game presents you with a huge world map and says, “Go on, get started,” so you can take that big map and devour it border by border.
Total War: Warhammer keeps things exciting by having each army approach the map differently. If you’re the Norsemen – an entire faction of Vikings and werewolves – you don’t need cities. You take over the other Norse factions by beating their leaders into submission, and you unite Norsca into a single yellow block. If you’re raiding the rest of the Old World, however, you hold only coastal settlements. You destroy everything else in honor of your dark gods, dedicating every pyre to the crow or the hound or whoever. Your victories are marked by the map slowly turning the color of ash.
Painting a real house is certainly boring. But doing the same thing with a world map isn’t really comparable. The Shimazu clan doesn’t stop me from getting over the doorpost. There are no vampire pirates protecting the baseboard.
Watching continents change color over the course of hundreds of turns may be a rather paltry pleasure compared to strategy campaigns with more options for cunning and decisive action, but it still has some of that joy you get from completing a puzzle, that feeling of looking down from afar on a world whose shape you’ve changed and saying, “Yeah, I did that.”
