\nIntro: A Beginning Is a Delicate Time<\/a>
\nTom 1-50<\/a>: Atreides Established
\nBruce 51-100<\/a>: The Geryk Manifesto
\nTom 101-150<\/a>: Chick’s State of the House Address
\nBruce 151-200<\/a>: The Space Bahrain Era
\nTom 201-250<\/a>: The Harkonnen War
\nBruce 251-300<\/a>: The House on Totilo Hill
\nTom 300-end<\/a>: The Fall of House Atreides<\/p>\n
A Beginning is a Delicate Time<\/strong><\/p>\n Bruce:<\/strong> When Tom Chick asked me in 2008 to take a few years off from Tom vs. Bruce, he said he wasn’t questioning my commitment. But the fact is that I had gotten soft. Since the early years when we had fought each other to a .500 record, my performance had slowly tailed off to the point where it was hurting Tom’s competitive edge to even play me. While Tom was being invited to major gaming championships across the globe, I was languishing as a utility player for a video game team in Toledo, and my career was in serious jeopardy. When Tom told me we needed to take a break so I could have some time to re-focus, we both knew what he meant, even though neither one of us would say it.<\/p>\n But the world of video gaming is a funny place, and just when you think that there’s no way to compete with the electron-quick kids anymore, life throws you a bone. With his current roster devastated by injuries, Tom pulls a few strings, makes a few calls, and all of a sudden, my agent is on the phone, asking if I’m interested in doing a serious piece on a very short deadline: something called Dune Wars. Heavy on the thinky-thinky. I’ve always been good at sims, and the world of Dune is one of those things that unless you have a lot of insider knowledge, it’s almost impossible to make sense of all the details. Given that Dune creator Frank Herbert died in 1986, two years before Tom was born, and took most of the secrets of the Dune world with him, I’m pretty sure I’ve got an insurmountable advantage in this one. I tell my agent to make a deal.<\/p>\n Tom:<\/strong> Dune Wars is a mod for Civilization IV, featuring all your favorite races, such as the Fremen, the Harkonnen, the Atreides; some of your least favorite races, such as the Bene Gesserit and the Emperor; and some races you’ve never heard of, such as Ordos and Ix, both of which are actual things.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the multiplayer doesn’t work when Bruce and I begin our game. We fumble around with incompatible files, sync issues, and gom jabbar fatal errors. So we trick Dune Wars by taking turns playing the same game. The idea is that I’ll play the first 50 turns and then hand the saved game over to Bruce. Then he’ll play the next 50 turns and hand the saved game back to me. And so on until we hit a victory condition. The kids call this a succession game. I call it the same two-party political system I’ve known all my life.<\/p>\n So how do we figure out who wins? The same way we always figure out who wins. By checking the score. Civilization IV keeps a running tally of your civilization’s worth based on population, techs researched, wonders, and so forth. It’s complicated math that accounts for Civ IV’s high system requirements. But the point is the better you do, the more points are added to your score. Each term, Bruce and I will track our contribution to the score. At the end of the game, whoever accumulates the most points wins.<\/p>\n NEXT PAGE<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I. Tom’s first term: Atreides Established<\/strong><\/p>\n In real life Dune, all the Houses start with a whole mess of stuff. In Dune Wars, as in Civ IV, you pretty much start with bupkis. And you have to be very careful where you first plant this bupkis. As you know if you’ve ever read the book or seen a YouTube clip of the David Lynch movie, Dune is a desert planet. That means water is superimportant. Since George Lucas didn’t think up Dune, you can’t farm water. Instead, water comes from wind traps, which are built on hills and have to be spaced just so; dew collectors, which are built on whatever sparse vegetation we can find; and wells, which are built on ground water sites. Each of these sources improve its water yield as you follow a certain branch on the tech tree. Wind traps are the easiest and most flexible source of water, so I push us along that path of the tech tree.<\/p>\n Arrakeen, our first city because that’s the way it is in real Dune, has nearby sources of etching resin where our insect farms will earn us extra money. It also has nearby ore that we can eventually mine for extra production. A botanical testing station, known as a goodie hut on Earth, reveals a fully developed coffee plantation within the borders of Arrakeen. I wasn’t aware that coffee was a thing on Dune. You can learn all kinds of things playing videogames. Dune coffee. Who knew?<\/p>\n After a bit of scouting, I get the political lay of the land. Immediately north of Arrakeen, a thin ribbon of impassable desert separates us from the nearest land mass. In Dune Wars, units can’t cross sand until they develop stillsuits or suspensor technology. Except for the Fremen traipsing across the sand, riding sandworms as if they were ponies. They seem to be having a lot of fun just going wherever the heck they want.<\/p>\n On the other side of this thin strip of desert to the north is House Ecaz. Your guess is as good as mine for who House Ecaz is supposed to be. I don’t remember those guys from the movie. I looked them up. I’m still not sure who they are.<\/p>\n To the south is House Harkonnen. Everyone knows who they are. The bad guys.<\/p>\n Also down south is House Corrino. I looked them up and discovered these guys are basically the Emperor. Hopefully they can keep the Harkonnens in check.<\/p>\n Atreides score: 148 NEXT PAGE<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n II. Bruce’s first term: The Geryk Manifesto<\/strong><\/p>\n Knowing all this ahead of time lets me draw the appropriate lessons and act accordingly. It’s like a Bradygames Strategy Guide for Dune Wars, only it’s called Life: The Strategy Guide, a.k.a. History, and it will be around long, long after Bradygames goes out of business.<\/p>\n Secret Santa Agenda Item Number One is establishing very clear guidelines for our nation-planet. Dune Wars has some pretty cool extra victory conditions that simulate the real life conditions present on worlds created by Robert Heinlein. The first, called a “terraforming victory” based on some kind of environmental nutjobbery, suggests that growing frankencense and myrrh all over whichplace automatically transforms your planet into a kind of galactic utopia. Now I see where Brian Reynolds is funneling his PAC money.<\/p>\n My interest is in the second victory condition, called a Spice Monopoly or also called Someone Listened to Reason Magazine. The suggestion there is that if you are able to successfully control 65% of the spice on the planet, you may be able to get Bain Capital to outsource it for you. Since that’s a win-win for everybody, you win as well. Because I’m playing as a hard-working everyman, I’ll double-win. This game is all about playing the percentages.<\/p>\n Right now, that’s a long way away, because I can’t even build a spice harvester. In typical Chick fashion, Tom has started us off by researching Mining, and then instead of continuing on to Spice Extraction, he switched immediately to the water tech line and pushed straight through three techs to Arrakis Habitation. You know what that tech enables? “Oppression”. I am completely not joking.<\/p>\n Anyway, on turn 50, Tom left me one settler in perfect position to found a new city. It’s my refined sense of respect for History that makes me name it Sergeybrinograd.<\/p>\n Wind Traps give +1 water and are essential early-game improvements<\/p><\/div>\n Right now there isn’t much to do except build improvements and explore as fast as possible, so let me clue you in on some of the secrets of Ursula K. LeGuin’s amazing world, which has the advantage of being 100 percent historically accurate. Sand in this game acts like water in Civ IV, and water acts like food. Food acts like nothing, because there isn’t any. Seems like Tom’s halfway to his worker’s paradise already.<\/p>\n I need to get Spice Extraction researched, so that we can start getting those harvesters built. After that, it’s on to Education, because that is a prerequisite for Human Potential, which opens up a civic called Meritocracy. I know you’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking.<\/p>\n In the midst of this, it’s time to create the House of Atreides’ third city. I’m looking to combine a respectful nod to the political developments in Libya with a little more of a porn theme. The game reads my mind with its default suggestion of “Bangazi.”<\/p>\n Walid Jumblatt is a democratic politician in the very undemocratic nation of Lebanon. It’s typical of the courageous attitude the Dune Wars developers have toward the Middle East that when I finish researching Education, the game informs me that “the Walid – Youth Era has begun!” The prescient reference to a technology-empowered global youth movement, here on a desert planet under the grim reign of a technology-hating Patriarch, frankly gave me chills.<\/p>\n As I close the game in preparation for sending the turn to Tom, I pause in the wrapper to remind myself how great the wrapper music for this mod is.<\/p>\n Atreides score: 393 NEXT PAGE<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n III. Tom’s second term: Chick’s State of the House Address<\/strong><\/p>\n People of Dune — well, those of you who are members of House Atreides — I stand before you today as the man who brought you two (2!) brand spanking new cities. And what nifty cities they are! I named one of them Minas Tirith because I know you love those Hobbit movies. I named the other Sleepless because I couldn’t think of any other name for it and it was near our coffee plantations. Get it? Sleepless? Because, like, there’s lots of coffee? See? Is Bruce Geryk a wordsmith like me? Of course not. He names his cities things with lots of Russian syllables!<\/p>\n But let’s talk about the economy. I have lifted us out of hard times by implementing a spice-based economy. Look:<\/p>\n I have brought spice harvesting to our House and only one worker got et by a giant worm in the process!<\/p>\n Please note his family has been generously compensated for their loss with an extra ration of coffee, since we’ve got plenty to spare and none of the other houses seems to want coffee. Bunch of tea drinkers, I imagine. But from sandy coast to sandy coast, our little turtle-looking harvesters are chugging away in those fields of lovely spice, feeding it to our refineries, putting money into our coffers, and affording us the luxury of intensive scientific research to do stuff like dig deeper wells, make some cool quad buggies we can ride around in (take that, sandworm riding Fremen!), and build mushtamals in our cities. I still don’t know what a mushtamal is. Some kind of thing that makes people healthy. But I know that I had to build them because Bruce Geryk’s piddly clinics weren’t cutting it.<\/p>\n Speaking of not cutting it, I believe in peace through strength! Let me show you this chart:<\/p>\n That is the military power of each of the Houses at the beginning of my second term of rule. We’re the green line at the bottom. The one that sort of peters out under Bruce’s reign. The blue line shooting up to the top right corner like a rocket is the Fremen. It’s almost as if Bruce has never even heard of Ancient Earth POTUS Ronald Reagan. So I built several new soldiers and even some of those quad buggies that are so much fun to ride around in. Have you ever played Halo? It’s like that. After my robust military build-up, here’s where we are:<\/p>\n Okay, it’s, uh, not looking good. It’s not really easy to catch up with a rocket. I hope we don’t piss off the Fremen anytime soon. I probably shouldn’t have brought this up. Let’s move on, shall we? Let’s talk about how I believe in diplomacy instead of military might.<\/p>\n I have made friends with our neighbors whereas Bruce Geryk will probably trump up intel about Ixian stonecutters as a pretense for war. But I believe in friendly commerce, which is why I make a point to check for whether we can trade for new resources and technologies every few turns, except for the times I forget. I even sweet talked the Harkonnens into giving us sword grass in exchange for some of our extra coffee! The Harkonnens! Have you seen those guys? They’ve got, like, pus coming out of them. Look.<\/p>\n With the power of diplomacy, I hope one day to get my hands on Princess Irulan’s diamonds, if you know what I mean.<\/p>\n Speaking of diplomacy and smooth talking charmers like me, when the hot Asian chick from House Ordos offered to trade us feudalism, I took her up on her offer so that we can enjoy the fruits of serfdom and hereditary rule. Now I realize that may sound like no great shakes to serfs and those of you who aren’t related to royalty. But would you rather have the subsistence labor and despotism we had on our civics screen under Bruce Geryk’s rule? Of course you wouldn’t! Those sucked.<\/p>\n I hired that great scientist from the backwater town of Sergeiobingowhatever to build the Tom Chick Official Space Science Academy of Arakeen that is even now researching the technology for offworld trade. And you know what that means, don’t you? It means landing stages, which means unique resources which could mean — that’s right! — Caladanian wine. Can you say “par-tay”? Speaking of which, I started the banquet hall in Arakeen that will be completed on turn 164. Remember that fact when Bruce Geryk cuts the ribbon and pretends like it was all his idea.<\/p>\n So I stand here today having more than doubled our score and I implore you to hang in there while Bruce Geryk does whatever Bruce Geryk is going to do for the next fifty years. I shall return!<\/p>\n Atreides score: 997 NEXT PAGE<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n IV. Bruce’s second term: The Space Bahrain Era<\/strong><\/p>\n It’s interesting that in an imaginary world where two autocrats alternate power for five hundred years with no chance of overthrow and guaranteed reinstatement, Tom still feels he has to give a campaign speech.<\/p>\n If I can just get all real-life introspective for a moment, I think the one thing that sums up Tom’s and my philosophical differences is probably the divergent conclusions we drew from our experiences in prison. Tom’s strategy of accommodation with the authorities may have won him his freedom, but it didn’t win him many friends, leaving him tied to the current power structures for protection from those whose trust he betrayed in order to save his skin. While my skin may have not been spared, my soul remained intact, and it’s this moral center which allows me to make the difficult decisions in our game which Tom avoided, likely out of deference to the autocratic phantoms which still haunt his dreams.<\/p>\n You know how old people sometimes tell you stories that you probably heard before but you listen politely anyway? Watch this. A long time ago (I’m talking over ten real American years) Tom Chick and I played a PBEM game of Alpha Centauri with some other people. Some of them might be reading this right now. I remember it was long ago because I installed it on my lab computer in grad school and used to fiddle with turns late at night when I was running Western blots. Anyway, one of the players, and I honestly can’t remember who, got put off by himself on a giant continent or Pangaea or something, and merrily expanded without any interference for about six Cretaceous Zones. He was so far ahead that it took a real in-game extinction event in the form of a show-stopping bug — which permanently corrupted the save as soon as the first player was eliminated — to bring the game to a crashing (ha! I kill me) halt.<\/p>\n The point of that story is that sometimes in Civilization games or their close ancestors, people win unfairly. Paul Muad’Dib and his Fremen have over twice our score, and are in no danger of losing that lead. Thanks to the absolute fidelity to the worlds of Philip K. Dick demonstrated by the Dune Wars modders, the Arrakis map does not wrap around like a normal Civilization map. Do you know why that is? Since you have not just spent the last 90 days reviewing every source of Dune information you could find, from the Dune: Heroes series to the dune buggy in Final Fantasy VII, let me tell you: you’re only playing on one planetary hemisphere. Why is that? Because that’s the way it was in those times.<\/p>\n And if you’re wondering where the line crosses from unfairness and maybe favoritism to outright corruption and perhaps five-to-fifteen at Riker’s Island, that line is just north and slightly east of the Atreides city of DFW. Past that, you’re in Fremen territory. Oh, and there’s another line south of Kotaku Rock. That’s all House Corrino. If you’re saying to yourself, Bruce, how can you possibly take advantage of the map edges if you have other civs to your north and south, you’re a long way to understanding the secret of the Bene Gesserit.<\/p>\n So we’re locked in, with a nice spice field to the east and another to the west, but without the cultural superiority to push our borders, we’re well on the way to becoming Space Bahrain. While that may sound great from an income perspective, the Fremen are the real Space Saudis here. At least I’ve grabbed the points lead from Tom again. The spice must flow!<\/p>\n Atreides score: 1554 NEXT PAGE<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n V. Tom’s third term: The Harkonnen War<\/strong><\/p>\n On turn 202, a rumor spread throughout Sergeybrinograd that Tom and Bruce were using their terms of service as the heads of House Atreides for some sort of bizarre internet contest sponsored by a grassroots movement of questionable repute called Kickstarter. House Harkonnen couldn’t be directly tied to the rumors. But when a city suddenly acquires a trait called “misinformation” that reduces production by 20% and causes unhappiness to four points of population, you can blame it on espionage. And where there’s espionage, House Harkonnen can’t be far behind.<\/p>\n This was the beginning of the Harkonnen Wars, a valiant period in Atreides history when Tom Chick demonstrated his considerable prowess as a cunning diplomat, an importer of fine luxury goods, a brilliant military leader familiar with the tenets of Civilization IV warfare, and a lover. On that last count, suffice to say Princess Irulan was often seen leaving the Atreides palace in Arrakeen during the early hours. The shrewd observer might note that she was in a disheveled state and often carrying her heels. That she would later agree to trades advantageous to House Atreides can’t have been a coincidence. I mean, who ever heard of just giving away techs like Protected Trade and Defensive Armaments?<\/p>\n It wasn’t until turn 214 that the cold war with the Harkonnens turned hot. Baron Harkonnen issued a declaration of war just as suspensor transports and their gunship escorts ferried an invasion force to Sergeybrinograd. Two bladesmen, a quad buggy, and a grenade trooper landed just outside Atreides second largest city, accompanied by a dreaded Maula mortar to shell the city’s defenses. Chick emptied Atreides coffers to call in heavy troopers from offworld. But these forces could do little more than fortify and await the Harkonnen assault that would follow the mortar’s relentless shelling. Meanwhile, the Harkonnen suspensor gunships began pillaging undefended Atreides spice harvesters. It looked like the only hope for House Atreides was to hold fast while the gunships shut down the Atreides economy.<\/p>\n These were dark days for House Atreides. But then something happened on turn 219. One of the captains from the units that would later be known as Chick’s Shield Fighters, an elite cadre with Ginaz training, recalls the morning of turn 219:<\/p>\n Well, it wasn’t really morning. It was more like one in the afternoon or so, because Chick is never up before noon. Our unit was just laying low in the bunker listening to the Maula mortar firing from outside the city. Back then, we were just sitting tight, with nothing to do but smoke spiked paintbrush glazed with spice honey and drink that Caladanian wine that was coming in from the new Bangazi landing stage. We were just partying and waiting to see what was going to happen next.<\/p>\n But then a royal shuttle comes in from Arrakeen and lands on one of the higher towers, out of reach of the mortar. Someone gets out, obviously someone from the palace because he had a whole mess of bodyguards and servants and whatnot. Anyways, this dude in a cape gets up on the parapet with a megaphone and starts trying to lead us all in a chant of We Will Rock You, you know, that song by Queen. We’d never heard it before, since this is Dune, not Earth. We had no idea what this guy was trying to do. He was trying to get us all to do that thing where you clap your hands over your head, but he was pretty much the only one doing it. My buddy Thurwatt hands me his lasgun’s viewfinder and says, ‘Hey, isn’t that President Chick up there?’ So I took a look, and sure enough, it was him, trying to do those lyrics, wearing his cape, clapping his hands over his head. He’d apparently just gotten the news about the Landsraad decision and was coming to tell us about it in person.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Fremen had submitted a vote to the Landsraad to stop the Harkonnen\/Atreides war. The vote had passed and the invading Harkonnen forces were immediately ejected from Atreides territory after only five turns of war. Chick would later claim credit for brokering the deal, but many historians believe the Fremen wanted the war stopped because they were in the final stages of conquering House Ecaz. Historians, man. Can’t those guys get real jobs or something?<\/p>\n Whatever the case, Chick promptly joined the war against Ecaz and spent the next 15 turns scurrying from besieged city to besieged city hoping to add a piece of the crumbling Ecaz territory to House Atreides. Again and again, Chick’s forces would arrive just as the Freman seized the city. But he finally succeeded on a remote rock outcropping to the west, where Ecaz’s last remaining city, Sukka Basin, had been stripped of its defenders by Fremen suspensor gunships. As Fremen ground forces on their sandworms raced across the sand toward Sukka Basin, Chick mustered a small invasion force on a single suspensor transport. By virtue of Sukka Basin’s proximity to Atreides borders, Chick captured that final city and officially eliminated House Ecaz. Chick immediately declared himself the conqueror of House Ecaz. Historians would compare this to a guy taking credit for opening a stuck jar after someone else loosened the lid. But what do they know?<\/p>\n Atreides score: 2404 NEXT PAGE<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n VI. Bruce’s third term: The House on Totilo Hill<\/strong><\/p>\n When you started reading this, I’m wondering if you thought to yourself, “I hope this contains some Dune universe fan fiction written by Tom Chick!” Because I think Tom is considering another Kickstarter to help him fund the sequel to that story.<\/p>\n Speaking of fiction, before we started this game, one thing I looked into was getting a hardcover first edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Sort of a memento to commemorate my first victory in the renewed Tom vs. Bruce wars. That turned out to be no problem, as long as I was willing to part with fifteen thousand dollars<\/a>. If some wear in the dust jacket or even a tear or two are okay, that might come down to seventy-five hundred or even forty-seven hundred clams. Disappointed, I decided to lower my horizons from a fantastic galactic war of untold dimensions to just some skirmish over an overgrown island. Sights suitably lowered, I was able to secure a slightly damaged 1943 first edition of James Tregaskis’ Guadalcanal Diary, at The Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, for nine bucks.<\/p>\n As the political and military situation on virtu-Arrakis went progressively pear-shaped, I found that changing my book acquisition activities from “Mission Accomplished” type showmanship to practical information on how to survive a ferocious military campaign in a hostile, alien environment never previously encountered really paid off. While I was reading Tregaskis’ account of Admiral Halsey’s visit to the troops on Guadalcanal, it occurred to me that unlike Vandegrift’s 1st Marines, I don’t have a lot of troops defending all the social programs that Tom has tricked me into building.<\/p>\n I’ve reviewed the numbers, and it’s pretty clear to everyone here on the spice desk that we aren’t going to be monopolizing anything melange-wise in this epoch. The whole “spice monopoly” thing has me more than a little bitter, and here’s why: the “control 65% of the spice” isn’t some kind of reward for creating a hyper-efficient spice cartel and distribution network. Instead, it’s really just another form of territorial victory. While the Great Spice Sea is just off our own Eastern Seaboard, there isn’t a sufficient concentration of it relative to the planet’s overall spice supply to form some kind of strategic focal point for conflict. Instead, “control the spice” is really another way of saying “control a lot of territory.” Which is great, except the Fremen beat us to it.<\/p>\n Instead, we have a lot of other problems. One of them is the fact that I’m running a lot of peaceful, spice-outsourcing programs, and other players are making machines that shoot guns and hurt people. While trying to parse the real-life reference the Dune martyrs were trying to convey in the “Tahaddi-Strength Era” message I just got, I decided I should concentrate on the “Strength” part. My research shifts to Aerial Combat, which should give me a ton of upgrades for my flying units, once I build desert airports.<\/p>\n Detail of the Great Spice Sea southeast of Minas Tirith, showing Fremen and Corrino encroachment.<\/p><\/div>\n There’s a place just south of the city of Kotaku Rock which I’ll call Totilo Hill. The reason for that name is that the Harkonnens are piling military unit after military unit onto that square, probably in some kind of massive investigative journalism effort to find out what my game developers in Kotaku Rock are developing. Like any good PR firm, I’m preparing a nuclear response capable of wiping them out before they can print a single carriage return.<\/p>\n I have another problem developing, though, and that’s House Corrino. You may remember them from the Prelude to Dune prequel trilogy by Brian Herbert. They’ve set up on our southwestern border and I don’t have much down there right now to be able to hold off both them and the Harkonnens. I shuffle some Hardened Bladesmen down through Sergeybrinograd.<\/p>\n With the news that we’ve researched Aerial Combat, I set our research path to Mobile Armor, Military Complex, and finally Aerial Tactics. As soon as we get Military Complex, we will be able to build the Mongoose Trooper, a powerful and versatile infantry unit that can intercept aircraft, and gets bonuses against non-infantry units (including +100% against vehicles). My strategy will combine these with aggressive probing attacks towards Totilo Hill with Light Scorpions (enabled by Mobile Armor) which are good open-terrain units and can withdraw from combat. I’m hoping to whittle down the Harkonnens and then bring in the upgraded Thopters once Aerial Tactics is complete. We have a fully formed war-winning strategy!<\/p>\n But faster than you can say Errol Morris’ Fog of War, the Harkonnens start rolling down Totilo Hill. Entrenched at Kotaku Rock are the finest of House Atreides. The 5th Mobile Armor Regiment is fully equipped with Light Scorpions upgraded to First Strike – except that they’re handicapped on defense. The 2nd Caladan Guard, composed of elite Hardened Bladesmen, is great for city attack – less so for city defense. The Royal Thopter Wing is excellent for scouting and harassment, but mismatched in a close-quarters fight for our southernmost city. The hornet’s nest on the hill got poked a few too many times by my nuisance raids. I guess I should have remembered the lesson of Giedi Prime.<\/p>\n This all plays out on a laptop in a Starbucks in Queens, over a cinnamon dolce latte and their free wireless Internet. Yeah, I’m the guy playing video games in Starbucks. The battle takes forever. At least ten minutes. It’s so crowded that I have a hard time taking notes without overturning someone’s coffee. At one point a guy turns around and jostles me, my coffee, my notebook, and the virtual Arrakis of my laptop as he’s trying to take his drink back to his table. “Er, sorry about that,” he says. “Not nearly as sorry as Duke Leto, my friend” I mutter without taking my eyes off the screen as one after another Atreides military unit bites the dust. I wonder what his reaction was. Probably similar to what Tom’s will be when he gets the turn file.<\/p>\n Atreides score: 2205 NEXT PAGE<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n VII. Tom’s fourth term: The Fall of House Atreides<\/strong><\/p>\n What the…? Where are all our experienced units, trained in the Harkonnen Wars? What happened to all our improvements, which I can’t rebuild because we now have zero workers? Our spice production is decimated. We aren’t even making Dune coffee anymore! Worst of all, we’ve lost nearly half our cities.<\/p>\n This is what happens when you leave Bruce Geryk in charge of your Dune Wars game. Whatever happened in the last fifty turns was an unmitigated disaster. I was going to make a joke about the Democrats coming back into power after eight years of the Bush Administration dismantling everything Clinton had done, but this is way worse than that. This is what it would be like if Obama was elected to a country that had disbanded its military, shuttered its industry, and ceded everything west of the Mississippi to Mexico. Plus, Mr. President, a huge Harkonnen army is marching towards Chicago.<\/p>\n I can’t save Minas Tirith. The Harkonnens capture and raze it within a few turns. But I can pull everyone back to Arrakeen and try to rebuild. If I can just hold out for fifty turns, I can hand this mess back to Bruce. I have a fire sale on all our advanced tech, I drastically change our civics so we can draft troops and rush build new troops, I found a few new cities in whatever cramped gaps I can fit them, and I set up whatever trades I can manage to stabilize the population. Who wants to import some Caladanian wine at extremely favorable exchange rates?<\/p>\n But then something happens on turn 322 that seals our fate. House Corrino declares war. Yep, House Corrino. Princess Irulan’s House Corrino. This is the same House Corrino that used to be our closest friend. I have no idea what Bruce said to her to make her so mad, but it must have been a doozy.<\/p>\n House Atreides lasts for another 17 turns. It’s a brutal 17 turns. Irulan raids us with thopters, bombs us with Dragonfly Bombers, and even shoots down our air power with Locust Interceptors. We are effectively shut down. When the Sardaukar arrive — and they do arrive! — we can barely slow them down with our drafted troops. The Fremen, snugly in first place, look on with disinterest as their plan to terraform the planet into a lush garden proceeds apace.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/dune-sandworm.jpg\" "\\"dune-sandworm\\"")
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\nTom: 148, Bruce: 0<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Walid_Youth.jpg\" "\\"Walid_Youth\\"")
Being a veteran in this league has certain advantages. One of them is being able to remember the old days. Before gaming’s surrender to relentless consumerist culture and its reduction to a vehicle for selling the latest social media add-on, video games — then known as “computer games” after the room-size apparatus on which they had to be played — were at the forefront of the fight for social justice. The Dune series featured an all-powerful emperor who ruled the universe and whose autocratic methods spawned the cleverly named Fremen (a disguised spelling of the words “free men” meant to get past the era’s draconian entertainment media censorship) paralleling the civil rights marchers and Congolese mercenaries who were their contemporary philosophic brethren. Games of that time were often centered on all-powerful characters, known as “bosses”, who were the apotheoses of various oppressive ideologies and whose defeat in computer games presaged their real life demise. Political figures like Richard Nixon, military leaders like Marshal McLuhan, and religious demagogues like the Pope of Greenwich Village all met their virtual doom at the hands of rocket-launcher-wielding social reformers. The groundbreaking game “Doom”, known for its seemingly endless succession of boss fights, was actually a play on the name “Dune” and was largely an homage to its predecessor’s anti-establishment ethic. Today’s video games, centered on vapid exchanges between electronic “friends” sharing no common experience except the acquisition of a few more broadband approval badges, are a far cry from the pioneering days of computer gaming, when so many developers were harassed, imprisoned, and even executed for daring to squeeze a few bytes of democracy into 16k of code.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/fadingsuns.jpg\" "\\"fadingsuns\\"")
Dune pays tribute to these dead heroes of the diode with its overriding anti-technological theme, based on the tyranny of The Inquisition. Led by a cruel, vain Patriarch (widely thought to have been modeled on Adlai Stevenson), “Inquisitors roamed about the Empire in small task forces looking for forbidden knowledge and servants of evil”. In game terms, “Church Inquisitors fly from system to system trying to spot labs researching proscribed techs. While they are moving about, they look for labs and Churches. If they spot a lab they will move to it. If the lab contains forbidden knowledge they attack it. Scientists are sent to the rack, crucified and then burned.”<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/techtree.jpg\" "\\"techtree\\"")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/windtrap.jpg\" "\\"windtrap\\"")
\nTom: 148, Bruce: 245<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/This_stuff_must_flow1.jpg\" "\\"This_stuff_must_flow\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Collateral_damage.jpg\" "\\"Collateral_damage\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Peace_through_not_building_military_units.jpg\" "\\"Peace_through_not_building_military_units\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Peace_through_building_a_couple_of_military_units.jpg\" "\\"Peace_through_building_a_couple_of_military_units\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Hark_I_hear_a_Harkonnen.jpg\" "\\"Hark_I_hear_a_Harkonnen\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/My_new_trade_buddy.jpg\" "\\"My_new_trade_buddy\\"")
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\nTom: 752, Bruce: 245<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/beginnings.jpg\" "\\"beginnings\\"")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/game_tips.jpg\" "\\"game_tips\\"")
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<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/wealth.jpg\" "\\"wealth\\"")
<\/p>\n
\nTom: 752, Bruce: 802<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nTom: 1602, Bruce: 802<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/metamap.jpg\" "\\"metamap\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/spicefields.jpg\" "\\"spicefields\\"")
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Rougenecks.jpg\" "\\"T.")
And so down they march, Harkonnen Sardaukar Troopers, the Mentat-slaughtering, Duncan Idaho-subverting swine, and in the largest single battle I have ever seen in Civilization IV, the finest soldiers of House Atreides are put to the space sword. Speaking of Mentats, I did have a sizable force defending Kotaku Rock. Not anymore.<\/p>\n
\nTom: 1602, Bruce: 603<\/strong><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/fp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/Dune_garden_planet.jpg\" "\\"Dune_garden_planet\\"")
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