Great moments in PC gaming: Painting the map your color in a strategy game
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Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
'Painting the map' has a bad name among some players, becoming synonymous with the kind of strategy game where it's the only thing there is to do. Which, for sure, can be boring. When there are no options for politicking and diplomacy, no interesting alliances or trade negotiations or paths forward that don't involve building up a bigger army than that other guy over there then forcibly taking his land, that's dull. But it doesn't have to be.
When painting the map is done right it's half the fun of Civilization, of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, of most of the Total War series, and many of Paradox's games—any time a strategy game gives you a great big map of a world and says, "Go on then, have at it," letting you take that big map and gobble it up, border by border.
Total War: Warhammer keeps it exciting by making sure each army approaches the map differently. When you're the Norse—an entire faction of Vikings and werewolves—you don't have much need for cities. You take over the other Norse factions by biffing their leaders until they submit, confederating Norsca into a single block of yellow, but when raiding the rest of the Old World you only bother holding coastal settlements. Everything else you raze in honor of your dark gods, dedicating each funeral pyre to the crow or the hound or whoever. Your victories are commemorated by the map slowly turning the color of ash.
Painting an actual house is boring, sure. But doing the same to a map of the world doesn't really compare. The Shimazu clan aren't preventing me from getting above the door jamb. There are no vampire pirates protecting the skirting board.
Watching continents change color over the course of hundreds of turns may be a base pleasure compared to strategy campaigns with more options for cunning and decisive action, but it's still got some of that completing-a-jigsaw joy, that sensation of looking down from a distance at a world you've changed the shape of and saying, "Yeah, I did that."