O' Canada!

Robot Entertainment is host to a couple of Canadians, and when the Canucks brought home their gold over the Americans in Men's Ice Hockey at the Olympics in Vancouver, they were more than happy to boast of the pride they felt for their homeland.

Here is Robot Entertainment Artist Bart Tiongson with Team Canada's Jarome Igilna:

Robot Entertainment would like to congratulate the Canadian Men's Ice Hockey Team for their Gold Medal and are proud to have played a small part in their success. *wink*

Read on for a transcript of the Calgary Flames visit to Ensemble Studios in March of 2004.

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In January of this year, an ES employee sent an email around the office about how the Calgary Flames unwind on their road trips. We were delighted to find that they played Age of Kings (The Conquerors Expansion), and liked it enough to set up multiplayer games on the airplanes. They took along an ethernet hub, and created an inflight LAN, playing team games of random map, turbo mode Conquerors. Cross-country flights pass quickly with that kind of entertainment. As reported in The Calgary Sun:

The laptops are plugged in to power supplies and then all networked for the ensuing battles. And for hours, in teams of three, they'll square off for world domination.

Welcome to Age of Empires, Calgary Flames style, where the action is fast and furious and bitter to the end.

We contacted their office, and invited them to stop by for a tour and visit the next time they were in Dallas . Friday, March 5 was a scheduled match, so they chose Thursday, March 4 for an afternoon visit and tour.

At the end of the tour, they were shown the playtest areas, which had been reconfigured for their arrival with 16 copies of The Conquerors all ready to play. Although they were a bit intimidated at taking on the pros like Kevin Holme and Nick Currie, they agreed that a 6 v 2 match might be interesting. They weren't buying The Sheriff's claims of rustiness at all. 

To be fair to the ES employees, we finished work on The Conquerors in the fall of 2000, and most of us played very little of it after work began on Age of Mythology and The Titans. So everyone from the ES side expected the first few minutes to be tough, but we all thought the pros would figure it out pretty quickly and make an interesting game of it.

The match was set up in one half of the playtest area, with a crowd of ES employees watching the match on the wall of monitors outside the playtest area.

The teams were:

Team 1 (ES)

Player 1, blue, The Sheriff, Kevin Holme, Mongols
Player 3, green, TheMoonGoat , Nick Currie, Britons

Team 2 (Flames)

Player 2, red, ferknuckle , Andrew Ference (#21), Franks
Player 4, yellow, The Destroyer, Denis Gauthier (#3), Byzantines
Player 5, light blue, THE General, Jarome Iginla (#12), Saracens
Player 6, purple, turbo , Craig Conroy (#22), Celts
Player 7, gray, reggie , Robyn Regehr (#28), Spanish
Player 8, orange, frank the tank , Shean Donovan (#16), Goths

The game was 2v6, turbo, fast, coastal map. In turbo, your villagers gather and build 3x faster than normal, and it's vitally important to keep your early villager production constant, and to make sure villagers don't have too walk too far.

To accomplish this perfect villager boom, TheMoonGoat makes ES proud with two classic moves. First, he gets housed at the one minute mark, losing 25 seconds. Then, at 3:30, he goes for the hat trick: getting housed again, then using the garrisoned TC to kill his boar…which results in it being worth 0 food.

TheMoonGoat gets housed a third time at 7 minutes. Team ES is not off to a good start.

By 9 minutes, Team ES is starting to get it together. The Sheriff reaches 1000 points when the highest score on the Flames team is 754, so you just know he's planning to take one or two of them out early. The Sheriff has a nice boat boom going, and is the first to reach castle age at 12:18. Six of the other seven players would reach castle age between 15 and 16 minutes.

With four archery ranges already built, he adds a second TC. Moments later, he sends his first 15 cav archers over deep into TheMoonGoat's base, in response to MoonGoat's earlier flare. Then the talking starts:

The Sheriff: “Where are they?”

TheMoonGoat: “What?”

The Sherriff: “I'm here, where are they?”

TheMoonGoat: “Oh, I just flared to let you know where I was.”

The Sheriff: [non-verbal sounds]

So, the Sheriff has just wasted two minutes responding to an imagined attack. His score is now 2900, while all the other players are below 1700. Time for some action.

The Sheriff goes on the attack. He passes a group of Reggie's pikemen, and decides not to chase them. The Sheriff uses his cav arches to disrupt the Flames' economies, micro-managing them to best effect.

At 21 minutes, Reggie launches the first of something we haven't seen at ES in quite a while – a huge petard attack. Some work, some don't, but it sure is fun to see some of the fun old strategies.

By this time, Team ES has its act together, and it's time to watch some of the “teamwork” by The Flames. After Craig Conroy ( turbo ) had been raided repeatedly by The Sheriff, he had called for assistance. Nobody responded. When The Sheriff attacked again, he decided to try shouting to his teammates.

turbo: “Who's not listening to me?!”

turbo: “Who's yellow?!”

The Destroyer (Denis Gauthier): “ I am, pipe down!”

turbo: “Did you see him?”

The Destroyer: “I did… ”

Of course, by the time help arrived, The Sheriff had moved on.

The game was gradually shifting in Team ES's favor throughout the first 30 minutes as the old pros relearned the game, but they weren't able to take any of their opponents out of the game. As a result, things started getting tough once the Flames started launching serious attacks, with a remarkable range of units: rams, petards, trebs, infantry, cavalry, archers and priests. TheMoonGoat was the first to fall. Minutes later, The Sheriff was overwhelmed by a superior force, and he conceded defeat.

The Flames were quite pleased with their showing, they expected to do about as well against the pros as we would if we challenged them to a 6v2 hockey game. I imagine they'd play with an open net, and the puck would never be anywhere near their goal.

Following that game, the teams split up to take advantage of the 16-seat playtest lab. The Flames, in groups of 3, challenged the several groups of “regular” ES employees, i.e. anybody except the full-time playtesters. Some wins, some losses, a bit of shouting, and a lot of fun.

After the games, ES provided them with copies of Age of Mythology and The Titans, and several armloads of promotional gear. They, in turn, provided ES employees with a block of seats at Friday nights Calgary Flames vs. Dallas Stars game.

Many thanks to the Calgary Flames for such a good time!