Game 448: Excalibur

Disclaimer: This article series has one Monty Python joke.

I spent a few days playing Excalibur, not being sure if I'd complete it or cover it.

First, I read the manual portion of the included book, but it didn't make a ton of sense; it goes over the things you can do in the game, but purposefully avoids explaining why you would want to do any of it. E.g. "If you move to the bottom, you go to the Round Table Room. If you move your joystick sideways, you change the king whose name appears in the bottom window. If you press the button when the crown is next to an option, that option is executed. If you go to the top, you move to he Treasury."

Then I tried playing and was confronted with an obtuse set of screens clumsily linked to each other, almost entirely controlled by a Crawford-style context-sensitive one-button joystick interface. I was able to somewhat link what I saw to the things I read earlier, but couldn't really understand it or remember the specifics.

Then I read the novella portion of the book, essentially a novelization of a hypothetical Excalibur campaign, in which gameplay mechanics' cause-and-effects are demonstrated in prose, and when that isn't possible, explained through Merlin's pedagogy.

Then I re-read the manual portion, and things made a little more sense now that I'd seen the things it was talking about. The explanation that the left-hand WEALTH number represented kingdom wealth and the right-hand one represented treasury wealth stuck with me this time, though the precise relation between all the numbers was still not totally clear. Then I played some more and things made a bit more sense, but I was still unclear on how things like tithes and tributes worked.

And after a few failures, each of which taught me a thing or two from the attempt, I won! Arthur unified Britain once and for all. Only I'm still not really sure how I did it.

I made one last go at the game, this time using Altirra's built-in video recorder, with the subgoal of showing as much gameplay as I can, but also with the rule that I don't save or load. If I lose or feel the war is hopeless, then that's that. There will undoubtedly be much overlap with Wargaming Scribe's four-part AAR and definitive Crawford-endorsed review, but I'll try to avoid redundant coverage where I can.

We begin in the Round Table room where Arthur, his queen, and his knights gather. Each knight is represented by a shield bearing his distinct coat of arms, and his proximity to the table represents loyalty to Arthur. Proximity to other knights represent their interpersonal camaraderie - unhappy knights can drag their pals away from the table with them, so this matters! Maybe. Truth be told I could never figure out the true dynamics here; you can cause a revolt and instantly lose by leaving a rebellious knight behind and alone, but I never saw a reason to do that, nor did I ever manage to sway anyone with gifts or honors.

One time, though, the game started with Sir Nosnikta literally on Queen Guinevere on top of the table, so I banished him immediately.

The scene illustrates one of the recurring problems I have with Excalibur. Crawford wanted to make an Atari game, not a computer game, and is dedicated to making the interface as diegetic as possible, where you directly control an avatar, using nothing but a single-button joystick, and everything you do is in a discrete location. You don't have status screens; you have an assortment of rooms and locations where you physically move your avatar to interact with options and query for information.

Frankly, this is a bad fit for a game of Excalibur's complexity and scope. The single-button interface worked pretty well in Eastern Front, but was single-modal and non-diegetic, and it still had some control awkwardness and shortcomings that could have been improved had Crawford allowed for more keyboard use, and even then he couldn't completely avoid using some keyboard input for basic actions. Here in Excalibur, where keyboard input is almost completely absent, it can feel like you're walking around a low-res Excel spreadsheet where you adjust numbers by bumping into the cell borders and performing actions by bumping into garishly-colored words in a font that is somehow both obnoxiously huge and semi-illegible.

The round table is pretty neat visual, if a bit cluttered, but in the end it barely matters. It could have been cut from the game entirely without much impact if any, and the functions that matter would have been better served by a textual menu. We'll get to those later - we need gold and men-at-arms to use them, and right now we have neither.

 

The "throne room" as the manual calls it - it seems more like a war room to me - is one of the most important in the game.

Britain consists of sixteen kingdoms, each ruled by a sovereign monarch, including Arthur. Throughout, they will fight and raid each other, eventually forcing the losing side to abdicate to a stronger neighbor - not necessarily their attacker - for protection, changing their status from king to vassal and forfeiting their autonomy.

You can check the status of each kingdom here, but this is clumsy, performed by cycling through the list of them, and the status is relayed by highlighting one region at a time in a color which is pretty useless to me. A region can be neutral to you, declaring war on you, declared war on by you, a tributary paying you to leave them alone, or a vassal to you.

You can offer tribute yourself to one kingdom at a time, but this is something I never felt the need to do in any of my playthroughs. I don't pay tribute; I receive it.

You can declare war here. You must declare war before engaging in hostilities on enemy territory. You can only declare war on one kingdom at a time, you can't declare war on your own vassals, you can't declare war on a kingdom that is already under attack from someone else, and declaring war on a tributary hurts your reputation.

What you can't do, however, is get any kind of high-level overview on the game state. Oh, no. You have to piece that together yourself by checking the news, and you have to do that pretty much constantly. Every declaration of war, every armistice, and every change in allegiance makes its way to the news pile, where you'll remain ignorant until you sift through the queue yourself, which you'll either be doing constantly, or perhaps not at all. There is no war secretary to keep track of things you might want to know like "who is attacking me and where are they now" and "who are my vassals." And if you go too long without checking, important news could be buried under dozens of old messages that you don't really care about. Or perhaps important news is the old news and then you're left wondering if it's still relevant or not! This is frankly one of the single worst aspects of the game.

The treasury is next, and this room, where a Hamurabi-like minigame plays out in realtime, is just as important as the war room. More than any other room, this one looks like a spreadsheet, and the Crawfordian control scheme is an awkward fit. Overall it's more well designed than the rooms south of it, but still has its share of obtuseness.

One important stat is not shown here at all - the kingdom's crops. Strictly speaking you don't really need it on screen - it is always equal to [Wealth + Taxes], but this is important enough to deserve its own line-item. Crops represent the size of your kingdom - your taxes can never exceed your crop unit count, and this increases on its own up to a maximum of 128.

Wealth represents the weekly income of the people post-tax, and is always equal to [Crops - Taxes]. Simple enough. The higher their wealth, the more quickly your crop count increases. Specifically, crops are purchased at an average rate of 0.0005 units per Weath per second, though I believe there is a random element. If your wealth is set to 40, it would take about 50 seconds to increase to 41, though this varies and can sometimes "skip" numbers and go directly to 42 after ~100 seconds.

The Wealth number to the right is your treasure chest. The contents of this can never be pillaged or stolen. When income exceeds expenses, the difference is put here. When expenses exceed income, the difference is taken. When this runs out, bad things happen.

Taxes and Army are adjustable numbers. The left numbers are your demands, the right numbers are what you actually get. The army economy is simple; spend 50 gold per week and you maintain 50 men-at-arms per week.

Tithes are income from your vassals, but you can't set them here; you must visit them yourself (once you have any!). Once again, left shows your demands, right shows what you get.

Experience represents the average combat effectiveness of each man-at-arms, and goes up automatically to a maximum of 255, so long as your army is maintained. Increasing your army size will proportionally lower it as fresh new recruits join, but they will eventually improve and bring it back up.

One thing that isn't shown here is tributes, neither what you pay nor what you receive, which seems like a glaring omission given that this can be a major source of income.

Again, much of the weirdness here is due to the square-peg-round-hole interface where everything needs to be as diegetic as possible, but this is just a room with a bunch of huge, poorly explained numbers in it. At least the overall simplicity means it's not so bad once you understand how they all fit together.

Anyway, as Merlin noted in the novella, you will grow faster if you don't tax at all, but you'll also get invaded and conquered faster if you don't have an army at all, so I raised the taxes and army to 18 gold/week. 

 

Lastly, there is Merlin's room, showcasing a pretty cool pixelizing effect that even my wife who has no patience for these kinds of games thought was, in her words, "neat." Merlin's spells get you an edge on your rival kings, but they deplete his power - the more pixelated he gets, the more you've exhausted him! Push him too hard and he'll fade away completely, and won't be back for a long time.

"Change" increases a rival king's disposition toward you, but I hadn't tried using it. Perhaps I should have.

"Pestilence" attacks a rival's crops, which I also never tried using. A vassal's no good to me if he can't produce enough wealth to sustain his own kingdom, after all.

"Plague" kills half of a rival's men-at-arms. It is very expensive but incredibly useful when you're about to get invaded.

"See" spies on a rival and shows you valuable intel - their economic situation, their army, and their disposition toward you and every other king. And it's cheap.

I had initially planned to cover my final Excalibur game in one post but this one is long enough and we've barely even covered a minute of gameplay. Only 179 to go!