Top 5 Valiant Defense Settings w/ David Thompson

hey gamers this is liz davidson from beyond solitaire and just for this video on my channel i've got a special guest david thompson how you doing david i'm good as always thanks for having me absolutely so dave and i are friends we wanted to do something fun and so what we decided to make is a top five potential future settings for the valiant defense series so david you have got a fourth game on the way in the valley defense series right now so you want to talk about that really quick yeah so so super quick for people who don't know valiant defense it's so far they're all been set in world war ii you take control of a small group of of defenders and you're holding out against overwhelming odds right so like you said that the volume four is landsworth ridge it's a first day of the battle of the bulge you are leading a platoon of about 20 guys and you're holding out against 20 american guys and you're holding out against about 500 you know german paratroopers and you're able to hold them off for about a day or so if you're successful so it just really sets back the german assault and paves the way for ultimately the allies to come back victorious in battle of the bulge excellent and of course other games in this series include pavlov's house which i'm on record is loving tremendously um castle eater and soldiers and postman's uniforms but tonight david is going to give serious suggestions about what he actually might make a valid defense game about and i'm going to make stupid suggestions from my own fantasy world about what you can make a value defense game about and we're just gonna see how it goes [Laughter] so david why don't you why don't you starts do you have a real suggestion okay so i i'm going to start us off as is not actually one of my choices so before before we we start on this list of potential future things one big caveat the next game in the series is already planned uh i won't talk about it i'm not going to reveal it because i want lansworth to have its moment to shine um but it's the i did want to mention that it's the first game in the series that i'm not the lead designer on so somebody came and proposed it um i was a little bit i was like oh we know maybe let's see how it looks and the designer has done an amazing job with it i'm super excited and that will be um our volume for next year so i we won't talk about that one obviously but i just want to let people know that that's that's there's a fifth game that's already planned so okay you heard it so you're almost everyone um that is true that's the first one i've ever told anybody that so um so i'm doing my games in chronological order starting with the oldest i'll move to the newest right because i don't have any other order i can think of so the first one is the and i'm going to butcher the pronunciation the sihang warehouse so this was 1937 this is during the i think it's the second uh sino-japanese war where the japanese are attacking shanghai and the chinese need to hold out long enough in shanghai to allow their troops to withdraw from the area and so you have these chinese troops that are manning this warehouse and they hold out for i think that's like four or five days there are they called them for something i forget the term the something 800 um but they're going to actually 800 soldiers or they fold out for a few days and what's really interesting is very crafty of the chinese the warehouse is right by the sort of uh area of shanghai that was occupied by westerners right americans europeans etc and they did that because they knew that the japanese would be limited in the way in which they could attack it right they would be scared of collateral damage and they knew that the western world would see this attack by the japanese against the chinese and the chinese were looking for sort of western sympathy so um very interesting story so it's a lot going on there uh i will say and this might be a little bit of recurring theme for people that know my series really well it's all like at the individual guy yet level that's all the counters so when we talk about 450 counter you know guys that you'd be managing obviously that would be a very different shift in the in the focus of the game at this scale that's really cool uh so what conflict does take place during again so it's it's 1937 right so you know we think of the second world war as like starting on the september 1st 1939 but really there's so many things going on like the spanish civil war the sino-japanese were so you know second uh sino-japanese war so it's just one of the many many things sort of leading up to the second world war it's during that time period all right so basically you you like to make world war two games but you're starting to branch this would be sort of pre-world war two yeah in this case just slightly pre-world war two yep ooh i like it i also love the you know you could have some sort of like opinion meter or something right yeah i mean you could imagine um based on what the japanese do it's possible that they accidentally hit you know one of the close by western places and western support goes through the roof etc yeah there's a lot of interesting things there actually the the um i don't have the details exactly right and i'll apologize like i haven't made these games yet so my research is pretty thin on these right so um i'll probably get some of the details wrong but i i believe it was actually some of the westerners who convinced the chinese to surrender because they were scared that the japanese would hit their people and so it's not that that japanese overcame the chinese soldiers they actually the chinese soldiers eventually they were successful in providing time for their uh their fellow soldiers to withdraw and um they had they felt like they had gotten the sort of western exposure they wanted and so they were willing to withdraw those troops eventually oh that's so interesting uh so for the record by the way so david how long would you think it takes how long would you say it takes you to research a game like i mean this is a years long process correct yeah i would say that on average uh for a game like a like a historical war game that i'm working on like valiant events or myself and see something like that it's about a year you know so so somewhere between the six month and a year mark is when i transitioned from doing just research to actually like modeling the research into the game but i would say on average between six months of the year of just research before game design begins awesome so yeah this is this is this conversation taking place before all that mine's taking place without research forget that no way so my first suggestion is not at the individual level but you could put good individuals in it because i think that this would be a great model for a helm's deep lord of the rings game i would really enjoy trying to hold home zeep until gandalf shows up and you can have all sorts of interesting weaponry you know it's much more medieval right so you can have you know um fire and catapults and battering rams and you know orcs and people on the wall and people inside trying to hold the door and i feel like there would be a lot of enjoyment in that game partially because the value defense series could i think be adapted for that but also because um you know the lord of the rings i'm sure the licensing is just so cheap it'd be super easy but one thing's for sure it would definitely have more sales that's i mean what do you have you know sino-japanese war or helms deep i mean these are like equally popular subject matters so i mean obviously to me they are you know what's funny about that is um when you're doing like a historical game like you can't just make stuff up right like everything everything has to be based in reality to some extent sometimes you can embellish things um if you're trying to make a point like a historical point and it would be interesting to um adapt literature like that and think through like what things what things have to be represented to stay true to the lord of the rings and what things could you could you embellish right so that would be an interesting just a thought experiment for that design yeah and token had such a complex world i mean you'd actually really have to read okay so you would probably be able to find out things about weaponry and there's you know it's been a while since i really gave the lord of the rings good read but i know that that's a good battle scene um you know you'd really have to dig in it wouldn't take six months to a year probably but you know you could do some really good ground work on something like that i think well you know it's it's funny because you have those world war we always we always joke and we're part of the war gamer historical gamer world so we're talking about ourselves when i say this but you know you have a game and somebody will be like oh actually that's not the right helmet you know or whatever and we're in in our world war two games i'm sure there are lord of the rings scholars that are the exact same way like oh actually the orcs weren't wearing uh you know those that that type of armor in this scene so you can't do that how dare you how dare you mess up my fantasy armor so what would your number four be okay so my number four uh moving along in our timeline is the battle of ben scar so again almost certainly mispronouncing that um this is 1941 i believe it's during the continuation war so it's the finns battling the soviets it's during world war ii but it's you know the the like again the finish and the soviets fighting still um there was this little island where the this is like kind of where the um the baltic sea the kind of like baltic sea just below finland it was this little island where the finns had a lighthouse and they have a very small garrison on the island like 40ish guys and the soviets were scared about the fins using the lighthouse and being sort of problematic for some of the things they were trying to do and so the soviets attacked the the island they assaulted it like an amphibious assault with a bunch of patrol craft and they had it depends on who you believe you know the soviets say oh there's only like 30 guys and the fence say it's all like 100 guys who knows but the soviets attack it uh and the fins are able to defend it but there's some interesting things that are happening like the um the fins are supported by a couple of gun boats so it's like obviously i haven't worried about thinking about this yet but like how do you incorporate some of this like small craft side action that's going on at the same time as the the defense of the island um but yeah i think that would be cool um and it's also i have a one of my best friends both in terms of just in life but also in gaming is a guy here in dayton that i met shortly after i moved and so he's my main war gaming buddy and he's huge into finnish uh history and so he actually he actually brought this one to my attention and so just because we're friends this is another like oh this would be cool to design for him you know oh that's not cool also i'm imagining because the water element some sort of value defense uh by stealth and sea mashup um yeah that's true that's true i could definitely see you know having some coastal defense uh options as the fins trying to stop the soviets and i mean what's interesting about that one that's not true for pretty much any of the other ones that we'll talk about or any of the games so far is that you know at the most the soviets had about 100 guys right and so it's the one that would be most closely matched in terms of like number of forces and so you know you could almost imagine that this is a slight like expansion in terms of the attacking side maybe there's a more conventional two-player element to it where you could have a full a full up exploration of the attacking side in addition to the defending definitely i can see that being really really cool it is way cooler than my next suggestion which is uh so listen let's hear me out so i think that'd be really fun to do a dawn of the dead inspired zombie mall defense game so i was actually thinking about it while i was playing uh uh lazarin because um you know you have the fences where the soldiers can pile up at the fence and i was thinking you know look at all the glass doors and stuff at a mall so you could have like some pile-ups happen and then they would bust through the glass and you could maybe come up with something that's either sort of creative ways to block things using stuff from the stores in the mall or like unusual weapons that come from the available merchandise and you could definitely have like a roof sniper you know yeah absolutely absolutely it's so funny like besides all riffing on the exact same ideas like all the cool zombie stuff you can pull from like just malls themselves are dead now like yeah you know what i mean like so well like it's funny just to think of all the different settings the realistic settings that you could do with these old dilapidated malls and stuff like that but yeah absolutely it would be you could definitely have some fun riffing on like the possibilities of of holding off swarms of zombies oh yes and someday probably not too long from now people are going to talk about malls as far in the past as we talk about world war ii oh yeah yeah remember when they had malls my dad worked at a mall [Laughter] my grandpa said he went to one once [Laughter] you know when i'm researching right like the greatest artifacts that you can find is like a map right from a battle people will have those those stupid maps that were in the mall right like those triangular things yes oh wait let's put a claire's in there and then the kitties they can use the jewelry to fight off the zombies oh that's awesome i mean i would be all for that you know i mean like you can have people fighting get their their you know their little soldiers their people into like the sporting goods store or at least there's something in there that's that you can hit a zombie with i just feel like there's so much potential in that to be funny and to like give it a cool aesthetic from the high point of maul's era right yeah absolutely yeah i mean like a stranger things vibe that's exactly what i was thinking it would have to be the stranger things mall from yeah yeah absolutely oh my goodness that'd be awesome but back to serious history what's your number three all right my number three you know this one already so this is more tane right so we're doing we're doing chronological so now we are august of 44 it would be right so um this one is one that i've actually thought about i've actually done quite a bit of research i had to put that on the back burner because so many other projects um it's it's another one where the scale is a little bit weird right because when i first started thinking about the battle martine it's it's for people who aren't familiar with it um it was hitler's sort of first major counter offensive right so he was trying to counter attack to get back to the coast and there was this key a small little village in in um in france called martine and so he's the americans hold out there and it's super important to me because my grandfather was part of that unit that was there and there's this one specific hill it's called hill three and four because that was the elevation of the hill um where a smaller part of the overall american unit was cut off and they were cut off by themselves for like five or six days and during that period where they're cut off it got it you know it gets so bad and this is always the way i tell it so that people try to help it resonate with people it got so bad and their wounds were so bad and their shortage of supplies were so bad that the american artillery they would actually take propaganda shells so like they could they would they were empty and they would fire them at their own guys with trying to resupply them uh even trying to put like plasma in there right like so you're literally are so desperate that you're putting plasma in a shell to fire at your own people hoping to get medical supplies so um now it's an interesting one because it's actually a massive we were talking over a division of american troops so thousands and thousands and thousands of guys on the supporting side and i think it opens up a lot of opportunities that haven't been seen in a valiant defense game before but one of the hesitations i have is i'm not 100 sure that volume defense is the right system for it so i think it i mean i think it could work but i think it might not be the best for it so that's kind of where where i've kind of waffled and again other projects competing projects have taken over but that's definitely there will be definitely a more tame game from me and it might be valiant defense nice yeah i'm a big believer that you should use the system that's the best as opposed to the system that you wanted at the first you know yeah right exactly yes exactly but uh so for those of you who don't know a ton about the battle more team but want to uh actually i think it was my second ever podcast interview was with you about this battle and the research you were doing so i will link it below uh yeah dave is a podcast regular as well [Laughter] all right so i actually do have a historical one for my number three and it's actually one that's been uh modeled in a dan person game before in field commander alexander because it is the siege of tire so this is a really interesting it's a longer term battle than anything that you're normally getting from a value defense game but uh basically alexander wanted the tyrians to accept him as the boss you know of his of their city and they were like no and they were on an island and their walls like went right up to the sea so alexander couldn't just march in there and take the city even though he had a superior army so he spent like seven months blockading the city and then building like a pathway from the land to finally attack and so you know you have tyrians who are like you know stopping the macedonians at every turn and trying to disrupt everything but through sheer just stubbornness alexander does in fact eventually make it all the way to tire and take over the city but talk about a valiant defense um i think that that is such a wild battle and a wild siege and i feel like that would be a really interesting game in itself uh outside of the field commander alexander system how long was the siege months like seven months long okay okay that's interesting yeah oh yeah you should he he did not play you should make a valiant defense game about that i know a guy that could that could help that would be fun but wait till you hear my next one but okay okay okay all right but uh but what is your number two okay my number two is the siege of jodetville right so um there there has been a movie about it um it's come to light in recent years so the movie's actually pretty good and i think the movie is called siege of joda bill it's about um oh so time frame 1960 1961 something like that it's a u.n force that's in this case all consist all of uh an irish company of infantry i think um they're going into a separatist region of the congo i think it's called katanga is the actual separatist region um they go in there and they're trying to be part of this larger u.n presence right that that's dealing with this sort of uh emergent uh katanga separatist uni uh whatever formation fighting the congolese and they're they're drawn into this battle uh they're actually attacked by mercy this is the craziest like combination of people so it's it's the whatever you would call them like fighters from the separatist area right but they're led by these mercenaries that include like belgians french rhodesians so like the really really bad guys from this area right and so um the irish company holds out for i think again five or six days something like that um it's about 150 guys and they're holding out against thousands probably about 5 000 total that are attacking um and the attackers have things like a field gun they have mortars they have an aircraft that flies over and bombs them um and meanwhile the irish are basically not defeated by the attackers right they're defeated through imagine this like political ineptitude of the u.n right like i know no one's surprised by that but um eventually they they just there there was attempts to relieve them by another u.n force but that was unsuccessful and so eventually they just have to surrender because they have no other they have no other choice right they're not getting any sort of direction mostly because of political reasons and so ultimately they have to have to surrender but i think that you know obviously this this idea there's a ton of political baggage with this concept right and so you start digging into it and you're like well should the you and blah blah right you can debate all of this stuff but what's what i don't think is debatable was the like the the bravery of the actual individual guys who are irish soldiers who are there trying to do the best job they can for what what most people would think is a good you know a good thing so yeah it's just an interesting dynamic that i think would make for a good game now it starts to encroach into this probably to current to be comfortable land right 1961 a lot of these guys are still alive you know so um you know you know me so you know we start to get into like a little bit of discomfort there but yeah i think that would be my next one ooh that does sound really good i feel like there's so many interesting game elements you could bring in to that that would make it extra exciting yeah yeah i think that most when i think about it you know and again i haven't spent much real time thinking about it but there you know there's these there are these efforts to relieve them right to have like a uh support force break through and help them then it consists of um more irish indians and i can't remember who the other who the other maybe swedish but anyway they were trying to break through and help and you know and like is that possible in the game like is there some thing you can do to like make it like this sort of alt history thing happen because unlike many of the other games in the series like there was never any chance of relief for those others but this this was realistic it could have been so how much how much agency do you give the player to control that or do you give them any at all yeah dude that's good so i'm going the opposite direction so you've gone like further up in time this i'm going to go back okay no so this is this is after alexander alexander is the earlier of the two but uh i think you could make a great value defense game out of the siege and then battle of alicia which is a major battle during the gallic wars fought by julius caesar but i think it'd be really cool to do it from the perspective of the gauls so um verse in generics is the leader here and he kind of gathers i think it's the averny in this last big attack on the romans and he's trying to lure the romans to alicia to do like a pincer movement on them and win and first and generics is pretty smart but um i don't think that he expected how crazy roman's siege practices are because the romans essentially parked outside of the city walls and then built their own walls around the city so they had like these double fortifications there's one to kind of protect them from the defenders in lisia and there's a double wall to protect them from people trying to come out from outside to relieve them wow okay so like it just gets totally nuts and you know the galls are trying to slow down the construction and then you have girls on the outside who at least some right are showing up to try to help but it ends up i mean it ends disastrously uh it gets so bad inside of lisia that they sent the women and children out of the city um hoping that the romans might show at least some mercy to them but the romans just let them die oh my goodness wow it's a really brutal battle yeah and you know just a brutal siege where it just doesn't really you know it's just really a cruel but very interesting um defense situation yeah yeah and so i feel like that would be a very interesting uh setup for a game i would have to research a bit more to decide like if i thought that there was enough fighting to balance out the suffering right right but yeah i mean i but the way you're describing it i think would be a very like it absolutely could be it would be a very different one right like he wouldn't have these waves like the traditional sort of valiant defense waves like it would have to be almost like maybe more localized pockets potentially of activity yeah that sounds really cool yeah but like i just think it's hilarious that the romans decided like okay well we'll just build our own little like walls and hang out and then it's hard for them to mess with them on either side like yeah you know well the roman army is really cool in the sense that um they were engineer there were a lot of engineers in the army and the armies did public works projects when they when they weren't fighting so those roads um other large construction is partially done because of the roman army so and those guys knew how to pitch a camp really fast they carried equipment with them it's a totally different you know attitude but i think it'd be interesting to try to do this from the perspective of the gaelic i mean the gaelic forces trying to break out from inside and break in from outside yeah wow yeah that's cool yeah that's certainly different that's cool yeah but let's not delay what's your number one all right my number one now keep in mind we're moving to more recent right so this has been one that's been requested quite a bit by people who are uh fans of the violent defense series so this is either outpost kating or the battle of camdish whatever you you know that as right so this is um 2009 i think it is afghanistan um it's a outpost that's almost entirely americans there are some local afghans that are support there and i think two latvians that were with them um as part of i'm sure like part of an element of a nato force or whatever and so they are attacked by insurgents um so it winds up being like about 150 or about i guess about 100 or 70 whatever it is americans and about 300 insurgents um this is obviously very modern i don't feel comfortable at all i mean like so many things would have to happen to make this like you i would have to reach out to all the people that were there i'd have to work with the army i mean there would be so much like there's so many barriers to this that i will i will admit that this is a perfect scenario for the system but you know that it's just a lot of sort of pain in this design right but um but yeah ultimately many americans are are wounded um some killed um they do have wound up evacuating the outpost and eventually they just wind up destroying it because they had to leave ammunition and stuff behind but yeah of all the sort of modern battles this is the one that's probably objectively a perfect fit for the vine defense series oh man that's really cool have you thought about at least beginning the process of putting out feelers for this or is it just not even something you want to touch right now i think um i think i haven't oh so the answer is i have not and i think the reason is because like i said there would be so many things that boxes have to check to become comfortable with it that i know that that would be a huge time investment and i don't have the time to do it right so like the only way that something like this would be feasible is that if i was doing like a military history academic study right where i could like literally take a year and say i need to study the battle of cam dish for these reasons and as part of this i'm gonna have all this historic research and i'm gonna have you know made these um uh meet these people the people and work with the army and make sure that i'm doing everything 100 with the right level of sensitivity that this would deserve yeah and as much as i want you to just make whatever your heart desires as a designer because i like your games i do really respect that i think um thinking about who you impact when you make a game and whether you feel comfortable about it you know those are things that it's it's that answer is different for every person but i like that you know where that line is for you sure so a serious topic my number one is not serious it's totally frivolous but i think it would be such a good like i need somebody in the solo pnp group or something to make this for me um and you know what it's the season uh i think that home alone would be an amazing value defense game it would have to be different in scale right yeah but defending a house from some robbers and like having you know your little outer defenses like the doorknob that burns you know harry's hand and like the the christmas ornaments right inside the window you know you have to do something where you set up these booby traps to the house maybe the game would actually start with that yeah like you choose where to place your traps yeah uh and and then you roll for how successful they are and try you know you have limited time and actions and stuff to get to where you can call the cops and get out of the house yeah i think you know so what's what's funny is yeah i i suspected this was gonna be on your list and independent of that my wife and i watched that movie today so the timing's perfect um it's so funny it's such a funny movie and like humans are so weird as a kid i hated that movie right growing up i was like this movie's stupid and now i'm like this movie is awesome i love this movie this is great um did you know that there i guess there is a home alone game that just recently came out like a board game i don't i'm sure it's not great but yeah i'm sure it's as great as the remake yeah yeah [Laughter] but you know for me home alone i loved this kid actually i have a tremendous emotional attachment to it because it was the first movie where i saw the trailer for a movie and became excited and had the anticipation of eventually seeing the movie if that makes sense yeah for sure so i think i saw the trailer on like you know how they used to have little previews on the the the vcr tapes yeah and it'd be like coming up from this you know this studio uh i saw it i imprinted on it and i waited for that movie and when it came out i was so happy and i had a talk boy that's awesome i was i was very into it it is a really it's just such a good movie now now the newest thing about home alone is all the people that are seeing it for like the first time now for whatever reason or maybe they haven't watched a bunch of time and they put it on and they're just kind of watching it and they realize that maura rose is the mom from home alone like wait a second [Laughter] i knew her before then before she was cool she was always cool that's the secret but um i don't know i think i feel like that there's just so much mechanically that you could play with with something like that um you know when i think about a more harmless equivalent right or something like the grenades yeah uh you know from something like uh lands earth ridge where you know maybe you can't stop the onslaught but you can make them give up for a little bit and then regroup make them give up for a little bit and regroup buy yourself some time yeah yeah oh that's cool i'm all in let's do it valiant defense home alone yes next christmas no kidding i don't even know how much the licensing i would even caught yeah yeah and what's awesome is if the game if the game is super successful we can make some really bad sequels yes we would have to and then we'd eventually have to replace the main character and then our and then our fourth game could be like the first game but just different art yeah yeah that's fine but uh yes so thanks so much for coming on like talking about these like my ideas are ridiculous but yours are cool yours definitely would sell way better that's for sure that's for sure but you have to do what you love [Laughter] no this is cool i always love chatting with you and this is this is great so yeah just the season talk about home alone valiant defense exactly so for those of you out there if you want a real value defense game that actually exists there's one on kickstarter right now and that's the laser earthridge or you can get the previous ones that have actually come out in the series as opposed to the ones that we just made up for this video um so i know you can't tell us about the next one but there are upcoming games in the series how often are we planning to release value defense games in the future i think realistically probably one a year i mean that's what it's wound up being like we didn't we didn't plan that specifically but that's been about the average and i think that that makes sense awesome so y'all heard it here even if they're not the ones on this list there's always more value defense on the way so thank you so much for coming on david yeah thanks for having me it's been awesome leave us some likes leave us some comments we want to know about what you think would be a good value to fitzgame and most of all happy gaming [Music] you