California Missions

by on April 27, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I picked this book up mostly for the reproductions of a series of sketches of the California Missions. In 1856 they were already largely abandoned, and would soon decay into a ruined state (and by the text, this had already stared), but it’s a great resource so show what they had been like.

These were all done by Henry Miller, who did them as part of his journal of a trip from San Francisco to San Diego. He had arrived in California in 1850 (from Germany, by way of New York), and started a butchery business, and ended up as a powerful cattle rancher, eventually controlling some 22,000 square miles of land.

At this point, his fortunes are not so grand, and he made his solitary way down the state with a single mule. According to Belleorphon Books’ introduction, the text has been cut down (generally keeping just the part dealing with his travels), and there were previous editions of the sketches produced in very rare editions, so this is now the main accessible account of his journey.

The text itself is interesting, especially for someone that knows the names of places that would not grow up into large urban centers for quite a while yet. The illos are the main point though, and are great reference. It’s not produced to be a big expensive volume, and is a great value for what it is.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

Mating Flight

by on April 23, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Okay, with the title and subtitle, my original thought that this would be a look at draconic culture where power politics flows around and through the aspects of mating, and you know, not getting killed in the world.

I was a bit off. The titular mating flight is supposed to be more about picking a good mate, and hopefully love will come later. But it’s not supposed to all power and practicality either. There’s twelve years for the dragons to figure out where their lives are going. Since there’s always more males than females, a flight is normally three females and six males who have recently hit sexual maturity, and they go off away from parents to find who the females will choose, and have a bit of debauchery along the way, as fertilizing eggs is actually an involved process. So… nine very large and powerful adolescents on spring break for twelve years.

And in this case, nothing typical happens

There’s a large multiverse of worlds out there, some of which are ruled by dragons, some of which they haven’t gotten to. And nowhere, apparently, has been able to stand up to dragons who decide they want a place. The plan is to go to Hove, a “basic torroid” world (i.e., in the interior of a donut-shaped space), hang out for a duo-decade to figure things out, but not actually take over or anything inconvenient like that. That doesn’t go well.

Our viewpoint character is Jyothky, who hits sexual maturity a bit late at the start of the book, setting all this in motion, and keeps a diary of what’s going on. She is in a technical sense, disabled; she has no sense of touch. There are spells that let her monitor if anything has happened to her body, but it’s not the same thing. This also means that while she’s on a mating flight, she’s basically ace, there’s no feedback from the act, no endorphins, or any other positive feedback from the act, just the general sense/duty of wanting to have kids at some point.

By the end of the book, we’ve seen just how misfit all the dragons are even as they cause mayhem for the poor world that has ended up playing host to them, and trouble spreads in their wake over the course of a mere hundred days.

This is really just part one of two, so be ready to dive right into the second book if you read this. It is quite enjoyable, with Jyothky being a great sympathetic narrator, even with the amount of devastation that happens in Hove as it was struggling with it’s own version uni-polar politics.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

182 Strayer’s Strays

by on April 19, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

Jason came over last Sunday for a long-overdue day of FtF gaming. It was my choice, and there were a number of good possibilities, but I stuck with my original provisional plan of introducing him to Advanced Squad Leader, so he can start comparing it to the other tactical systems he’s played. I cast around for a bit for a good starter scenario, and settled on the on the old tournament scenario, “Strayer’s Strays”, which was originally T16 in The General Vol 29 #1 (and Squad Leader scenario O in The General Vol 20 #4) and republished in Yanks as 182.

A hodge-podge of American paratroopers are trying to get to a Utah Beach exit on D-Day, and have to cross board 6 with the bulk of their forces (10 EVP out of 19 possible) in 3.5 turns. The catch is that they’re doing it the narrow way, and the full width of the board is in play, so the Germans need to delay them with twelve squads to cover 33 hexes. Much worse, the only machine gun in the scenario is an American MMG. The Germans have no support weapons at all, other than inherent PFs. There’s a few tricks that could still be done, but I settled for a skirmish line that would hopefully delay the Americans near their board edge while I raced to concentrate.

Once Jason arrived, we went over a lot of basics (and showed him the old and new versions of board 6). Once we got going, one of the things I had to warn him about is “don’t stack”, which thinking about it, is the opposite lesson of Last Hundred Yards, where you generally keep platoons grouped together except when you desperately need to cover more area. At any rate, he came in in the U-Z area, looking to use the road across the board. The MMG set up in Z9, and I had to self-break a squad in V9 to keep from being taken out in CC. Poor dice rolls hampered both of us for a turn, though my one good roll (3) broke a squad. A squad and a half (including the self-break) ended up isolated and surrendering in W7 on his second turn. At the same time, his 8-1 and a squad got too aggressive down the road, and had to take shelter in X5.

As to be somewhat expected with a small and short scenario, things flip-flopped between looking very and and very bad for the Americans. The main thing was to keep moving and not get tied down with prep fire. My efforts to get in front of him was harder than it initially looked, but my occupation of the edge of the direct road helped, especially when a timely low roll got two squads with a 1KIA. After a good lecture on the ASL concept of Random Selection, I yahtzeed the die rolls, killing both outright. Meanwhile, ELR 2 was steadily eroding my force, and a couple squads disrupted by the end of the game.

All said, he got a lot of troops to the edge of the board, ready to exit through woods on turn 4, but it was only 9 EPV worth. For his final RPh, the 8-1 self-rallied to provide additional possible EVP, and survived a shot in the open to exit as well. (I thought I had got him on a second shot, but then realized I’d miscounted ranges and I couldn’t manage SFF on him.)

Afterword

It’s an interesting little scenario, and provides a nice dynamic situation. I could have certainly done a bit better, but my attention was a bit split with rules explanations, and that is fine. Certainly, placing one of the 467s in 6M6h2 was a worthy idea, since there’s a lot of ground they can see from there, and use 2FP long-range attacks on. It’s also not quite as tactically intricate as “Gavin Take”, which is a good learning scenario, but both sides need to have some grasp of the options available.

Jason seemed to enjoy the game, and certainly appreciated all the little details (understandably) stripped out of games like LHY, such as defensive fire, Dash, and bypass. Something with good opportunities for fire lane use seems like a good next scenario, which certainly suggests something like “Gavin Take” (though switching to different nationalities would also be nice).

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

Men to Match My Mountains

by on April 15, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is an expansive history of about sixty years, across a fair amount of space.

It’s also a fairly limited history, largely confined to what “white people” were doing. This is, in large part, man-vs-nature history, with strange people coming into a strange place and having all sorts of adventures. This is entirely about the early exploration and expansion of Anglo-American culture across four states of the US. Stone does take time to note that there’s just no written sources available from the Chinese who worked on the railroads being built through here. And that objection would also hold true for a lot of the previous inhabitants of the region. And this is a flowing narrative history, not in the least bit technical and willing to go into the weeds of population levels and other non-written evidence.

Certainly, there is a lot to cover here as it is. A good chunk of the book is dominated by the various discoveries of gold and silver that dominate the initial settlement of the region. Places where a few men found something valuable, and instantly, or so it would seem, towns sprang up. Many of the immediate places would go away again when the strikes ran out, but not all, and of course, the mineral wealth built other places as well, most notably San Francisco. The development of the Bay Area is one of several threads running through the entire book.

Later portions deal with the railroads, and the chokehold the Southern Pacific had on much of California’s economy. One of the more amusing chapters near the end deals with the Santa Fe finally gaining access to southern California, and the subsequent free-fall of passenger ticket prices from $100 to $25 (with a dip all the way down to $1).

Much of the earlier parts of course deal with problems of individual expeditions and bands of settlers trying to cross the region at all. It isn’t a coherent account of things like the Oregon Trail at all (that one especially, as Oregon is out of Stone’s scope). But there is enough to contextualize a lot of these early struggles.

Organizationally, it is interesting that Stone very much sets his book only in modern California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Events that take place outside these borders are barely touched on at all. The book is not formally divided up into these four states as well, but Stone does very much keep them in mind, and certainly groups things in accordance with those borders.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

Reform and Custom

by on April 11, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the fourteenth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous reviews here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View
Wealth of Nations: National Trade
Res Publica: A Tradition of the People
Art of War: Reform-Minded Patch
El Dorado: Expansion of Gold
Common Sense: Uncommon Changes
The Cossacks: Cossack Estate
Mare Nostrum: Paradox’s Sea
Rights of Man: Institutions of Man
Mandate of Heaven: Mandated Ages
Third Rome: First Moscow
Cradle of Civilization: Immersive Cradle
Rule Britannia: Europa Rule the Waves

The next major expansion for Europa Universalis IV reworked governments, and also acted as an immersion pack around India. Dharma was announced on May 19, 2018, and was released with patch 1.26 on September 6. Clean-up patch 1.27 was released on October 1st, and rebalanced a lot of items as well as adding new mission trees.

Reforms

The big feature for the patch and expansion was a rework of government types. This was one of the systems still largely the same as in EU III; there are monarchic, republic, and theocratic governments, and new, largely better, government forms within those types become available throughout the game. There’s also a set of tribal governments for more nomadic societies that can feed into the first three forms if they start settling down enough.

But EU IV’s expansions started adding “unique” government types for a lot of major countries. Generally, you can’t trade into or out of these types, so those countries ignore the entire government system of the game, and start with bonuses equivalent to a fairly late-game type, and have extra mechanics. This meant that nearly every expansion made a base long-term mechanic less important, and something needed to be done. (By my count, there were twenty-one different unique government types at this point.)

The new system boils everything back down to the main three types again (plus tribal and native—the latter only used with Conquest of Paradise), and you pass reforms during the game. These add new bonuses or abilities, and the unique government types are now just reforms only available to certain countries (and with the appropriate expansion). These are grouped into tiers (five to thirteen of them depending on the base government type), and you can only have one reform per tier, and need to go through them in order, though you can go back and change the reform of an earlier tier. Once every level of reform has been applied, you can then shift into a different government form, which is how tribal governments settle down in the new system.

Generally, a nation gets 10 reform progress points a year (modified by the average autonomy in the nation, as well as other influences), and a reform costs 60 plus 40 times the tier number (i.e., 100, 140, 180…), with changing an old one costing 50 points (or if you no longer qualify for a reform you took—say, because you changed religions—you can switch for free). Generally speaking, there are two to five different reforms available at each tier, with additional ones (mostly level 1 reforms replacing the old unique governments) tied to culture or specific countries.

At first, all this was only available with the expansion, but it was incorporated into the base game as of patch 1.30. Frankly, this was way too important to ever be an expansion-only feature. Changing the old government types cost a nasty hit in stability, which made switching something to avoid, but here it is a much more useful secondary system, and doesn’t lock you out just because you’re playing as a country an expansion has played with.

India

Outside the new governments, the focus of the patch was India. As usual, this meant splitting off more provinces (more than 100 were added), and adding new nations to the area.

The coast of southern India was split up more specifically to allow easier access to European footholds there, from more nations. In the north-east, Gurjat was broken up into a number of smaller countries (it represented a host of small tribal principalities), vassalized to Orissa, giving them access to a number of allied one-province-minor countries in its wars. The trade network was also redone so that Europe could pull value out towards the west easier.

Similarly, Burma was further detailed, getting a new inland trade node, and six new at-start countries. Two new wastelands were set up around Tibet to control access around that area.

Of course the expansion also comes with twelve different unique mission trees (introduced last time with Rule Britannia), while the generic (and free) Indian and Tibetan mission trees were reworked. The patch also included four new unique Russian mission trees for those who have Third Rome.

Policies

National policies had been introduced back in patch 1.6, but while there were some good bonuses to be had (and some not-so-good ones), they cost one monarch point per month to be active, so I imagine I was not the only one to avoid using them. Also, they were hidden away in the interface, and easy to miss.

Now they got a better display as part of the tab that decisions were moved to in the previous expansion, and the mechanics overhauled. Before, you could have any set of up to five policies active; now you can have up to three from any particular category (admin, diplomacy, military—based on what kind of points they cost), and therefore up to nine active.

However, the first policy in each category is now free, and only the second and third ones will cost points. However, Dharma includes a few options to upgrade this. With the expansion, Holy Roman traditions include +1 possible policy per type (allowing twelve total, but this does require being the HRE, and not just the emperor), four late-game government reforms each allow an extra policy, and there’s six reforms and a number of traditions that increase the number of free policies. Without Dharma, these all default to other bonuses.

This all came with an extensive rework of the bonuses given by policies, and is a nice rework of the system. Being able to get some for free makes it open for anyone, and the new interface reminds you they exist.

Charter Bus

The trade company concept from Wealth of Nations was brushed up for the expansion. First off, you can ‘charter’ a trade company, with a new diplomatic action to buy a province from another country in a trade region. Cost depends on development (so, poor areas are cheaper), and the colonial range of the purchaser compared to actual distance (this means that this gets cheaper later in the game as colonial ranges increase). Otherwise, they seem to be the same as before, with all provinces in a region that has a trade company active, but is not part of it, getting a boost to their goods production, which will give a nice increase to their income.

Additionally, trade gets a bit more dynamic with Dharma. Many provinces have bonuses to trade, giving the country that owns them more trade power in their trade node. These were reorganized into three explicit tiers or levels, with an increasing variety of other bonuses (including development and institution spread) to their owners. Without Dharma, these levels are fixed, but with it, they will drop one level (to a minimum of 1) each time they change hands, but can also be boosted by spending (a lot of) money.

The expansion also adds a new type of diplomatic insult, which costs prestige, but makes all enemies of the target like you better, in addition to worsening relations with the target. Also, the messages from the action have actual insults in them instead of a very generic notification.

An interesting expansion feature is that you can now assign colonists to existing province, in an effort to increase development there. You still have to pay the equivalent of the colonial cost, and its pure random chance (modified by all the normal development cost modifiers), but a country that gets some colonists… and then runs of of places to colonize now has something to do with them, instead of just regretting past choices (or starting over with an all-new idea set).

Poland

The patch cycle for Dharma included a second major patch to round up old and new bugs, and spend some time further detailing Poland.

This added new event chains, a new unique governments for Venice and the Mongol Empire (which was a new formable nation; it takes a lot of work to get at it), a couple new reforms for Indian governments, and four new mission trees.

The two Romanian nations (Wallachia and Moldavia) got map updates, and one of the mission trees, focused on building a coalition against the Ottomans.

Conclusion

Along with everything else, patch 1.26 moved estates from The Cossacks to the main game. They would get a more serious rework in the future (though as of this patch they no longer demand a share of the land you conquer, making them much more ignorable for a new player), but right now the main thing is Dharma included a fair number of extra estates for Indian countries.

With government reforms as part of the expansion, I’d rate this a ‘must get’, because the change was so desperately needed. Now that it is deservedly in the main game, the main general content is the bonuses to policies, which is a good feature, though still a mid- to late-game one. Similarly, using colonists for development is largely a late-game feature (but an interesting one), though if Expansion Ideas look good other than an initial colonist you won’t use, it could be handy early on. Similarly, the revised trade centers are interesting, though I don’t generally play the trade game enough to immediately notice it.

If you don’t have Wealth of Nations, this will give you charter trade companies, which is good for those seeking to see more European influence in Asia. And of course, the extra mission trees for India should be a big draw for anyone interested in playing in the area. India is actually a fairly interesting area to deal with and has its own mix of powers to navigate, and should be tried out by anyone who plays plenty of the game.

As ever, the biggest part for me is the free patch map changes, and I always appreciate the extra historicity they provide with finer detail and lots of new countries. 1.27 also tightened up institutions a bit (most notably, global trade was slowed down from some buildings having a double bonus), which was needed, as the initial version was a bit too easy to deal with.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment