Candidate Maximus

by on June 14, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had the gang over for gaming back on the day before Memorial Day. We actually had five over (me, Dave, Mark, Jason, and Patch), which is everyone at the moment. After some indecision, we’d gone for a day of smaller games, though we only ended up playing two moderate-sized games.

First up was Circus Maximus, which I like to start with on these days, as it generally takes us right up to lunch. Lunch ended up being slightly late as we needed to refamiliarize ourselves with the game after the last couple years of minimal gaming. With five of us, me, Dave, and Jason ended up with second teams to keep the field properly crowded. I went for an all speed design on my primary (Red) team (+2 driver, max team speed), and a high endurance team for the other (Yellow; max endurance, light chariot). I’m not sure what everyone else took, but I know there weren’t any heavy chariots in the field.

My Red team got a good start, and mostly stayed out of trouble as the lead slowly lengthened. There wasn’t a lot of combat this game, though there were a couple of incidents. I had planned on being more aggressive with my Yellow team, but they ended up out of the running, and never had a chance to do anything for the last lap. I did push the cornering a fair amount. Dave has long since mastered the idea of ending at the start of a curve at the innermost lane, which will get you exactly through and out it with no strain. My red team managed about three curves with similar placement on the 15 lane. By straining the corner at 17, you can do a similar trick, and have more options if someone’s ahead of you. With the -2 to the roll (for the good driver) I didn’t have too much to worry about, though I did injure a horse on one flubbed roll.

Everyone else was speeding around the corners too, and the dice were nice and friendly about it for the first lap or so. After that, things got a bit more exciting. There was a couple of horse injuries, and a fair numbered of ‘jostled’ results that caused trouble since it put people to negative driver modifiers, and you can only do things like strain once your modifier hits zero again. Going into the third lap, I got a SS, ‘double sideslip’, result as my Yellow team tried to speed through the turn, which was annoying enough, except that I had nowhere to go, with two other chariots in the way. This injured a horse, and shifted my result to a double jostle, putting my current driver modifier to -5! It took five turns to get back to 0, and with the speed problems that also caused, put me a turn behind everyone else.

Patch’s Purple team had a run a poor luck, with a couple of different jostles keeping him from straining, and then jostling again as he tried to make up time. However, in the same corner that I had trouble, he rolled an 18, and the chariot flipped. The driver managed to cut himself free a couple turns later and escape over the wall. There were a number of people who could have tried running him down, but it would slow them down, and no one wanted to do that. If it had been some sort of campaign, I think it’d be more likely.

My Red team ended up finishing two turns ahead of everyone else, though as the lead team was one space shy of finishing the next turn, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. However, the rest of the pack was very close together (see the table below to see the number of spaces past the finish they made on that second turn), with Jason’s Black team coming in a turn after that, and then my Yellow team.

Final placing:

1 James
2 Dave +20
3 Jason +19
4 Mark +18
5 Dave +15
6 Patch +6 [horses only]
7 Jason
8 James

I was a bit late getting back after lunch, and was a bit surprised to see Candidate being laid out; I hadn’t thought it was a leading contender. Its only the second time we’ve played it, and last time was with four, so it was Mark’s first time with the game. There was a long time of getting a grasp of what was going on again.

I don’t have any detailed notes of who ended up with how many votes or anything. But in the second round, I managed to take Texas (and the bullseye) with use of Favored Son, which gave me a nice lead in votes for a bit. Patch started getting a nice collection of states, along with Mark, while Dave and Jason struggled to get past about two states for a long time. Mark was in the lead by mid-game, and I handed him Favored Son on a small state so he couldn’t use it to win something bigger later.

By the end of the Primaries, Patch and Mark were in the lead, with me in a close third, and Dave in fourth. There were about 4-5 states unclaimed including California (thankfully Deadlocked, as I’d had no chance at it). Jason was in last, but had done well enough that he could still turn things around. I had another poor hand for the start of the convention, and took a chance that someone would use a scandal to force a second round. I thought that Dave (going first), had played one card (which would presumably be a Scandal), but it turned out he’d used three, they were just stacked so I didn’t make them out. Mark (going second), had put down a couple cards, but that was a bluff, and one was a Scandal. I used mine in the second round before using my low-value cards for the third round, and managed a win.

After that, Jason was out as the lowest candidate, and I forget who manged to pick up his votes (it might even have been me). After that, Dave was eliminated as the #4 candidate. The annoying thing was that at this point I was the front runner, and if I’d won Dave’s votes, I would have been about four off of a majority. But I didn’t quite have what I needed, and they went to Patch. Mark was eliminated as the #3 candidate… and I still couldn’t get a good hand. I didn’t even have a Scandal to try and hold him off with, and Patch took the nomination (and his third win out of four for the last couple of game days).

Given how poor my hands tended to be for the entire second half of the game, I’m surprised I did so well. I managed to leverage a poor hand going into the convention, but couldn’t get any more tricks up my sleeve after that.

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Patricians and Emperors

by on June 10, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Hughes provides a good overview of the end of the western Empire in this volume. He does analyze things, and come to conclusions, but the primary focus is providing a chronological outline of events.

That latter is the primary value as it can be hard to find any coherent look at the four decades from the death of Aetius to the death of Odovacer. There’s no central figure, which is part of the point, political power and fortunes were so fractured by this period that no one entirely rises above the other players.

However, Ricimer (who should be more prominent in synopses of this era) does provide the central focus for part of this book (enough so that I wonder if Hughes really should have focused in a little bit more and done a book purely on him). He is generally considered to have been the ‘power behind the throne’ for, oh, maybe fifteen years, and often takes the fall for the instability of the West. Hughes gives good reasons to believe that this is not the case, and that his actions were often in response to other political pressures.

This largely comes down to the Roman Senate, which, like in his book on Stilicho, takes the blame for a fair number of ills without introducing any real evidence. He may reference some pertinent sources in the end notes (which I have not gone through), but there is nothing in the main body. Nobody from the senate is mentioned by name. No description of what the senate was like in the Fifth Century is provided. Now he ascribes the senators as a whole with motives that are likely (protecting their own position, and the safety of their own lands), but there’s nothing here to actually support these assertions, so it’s nothing more than an axiom of the book.

Other than that hole, there’s a lot of interest here. Beyond any problems with the Senate, problems of the division of the Empire between East and West are made manfest. Thanks to a lack of a stable dynasty, and a horde of ongoing problems, in the West, the Eastern Empire has become the senior political partner, which ends up crucially weakening the West. Any time an Emperor dies (too common), there is a wait while the choice of a new Western Emperor is coordinated with the East. If the Eastern court doesn’t care for what’s going on, political and military support can get withdrawn, which leaves the West’s leadership high and dry. Additionally, Marcellinus maintains an almost independent existence as comes rei militaris Dalmatiae for almost this entire period as he’s supported by the East, but refuses to work with Ricimer’s administration of the West.

And of course, at the same time there is growing ‘barbarian’ influence in the territories outside Italy and Dalmatia. The book has about one map per chapter showing the slowly shifting patterns of who had control of what. Now, these groups are settled in the Empire by agreement, and acknowledge it’s authority. Mostly. Even the better actors, like the Visigoths under Theoderic acted largely independently of the administration in Italy, even when pursing the same goals. Meanwhile, Vandal kingdom in Africa raided Italy regularly, and the book shows two attempts to counterinvade that came apart utterly, and likely recriminations did much to make the situation in Italy worse. Hughes figures Gaiseric to be the most able leader and diplomat of the period to explain his long stable reign, and the Empire’s inability to reclaim Africa.

Hughes sticks to a largely chronological format, which means he doesn’t give any one subject his full attention as nothing got wrapped up neatly within one year. Mostly, this is well handled, but with some real long-term trends going on here, I think seeing something concentrating on just one of them would be a real plus. I don’t recommend this one for a more casual read because of this, but it is definitely a great framework for anyone in an interest in the last years of the Western Empire.

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Limited Pursuit

by on June 6, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Jason came by back on the 23rd for a game of Pursuit of Glory. I’m guessing that he’s in a mood to get back in practice with it, which I certainly can’t blame him for. Sadly, neither of us are used to actual weekday traffic patterns, and he got stuck for an hour, giving us a late start as well as getting refamiliarized with the rules again.

I took the Allies and took the standard opening at Fao, and my standard attempt to knock out a couple of Turkish cavalry divisions. However, Only one attack worked, with the Turks successfully Withdrawing from the other two. We missed the fact that even if it isn’t ‘win’ by final loss numbers, the Allies can always advance after a Turkish Withdrawl. That left me stalled in Mesopotamia for a while, as all my attacks would meet a delaying action, and then he’d move back before I consolidated the gain (too used to Evades in CC:A I suppose). Other than that, the first turn was fairly standard, though I got a fair amount of events played, and in fact, during the first two turns, got all six War Status available from the Mobilization deck.

Churchill Prevailed during turn 2, destroying everything except the Bosporus Forts, and I managed to get some spare OPS to advance though Sinai before the Turks got there, assembling two good stacks from at-start and reinforcements. Jason managed to reinforce the area, and it was static for the rest of the game, though I did get the Sinai Railroad started, so I would have been able to form a LCU there as of Turn 7. The Russian front got less attention from me, with a definite crisis on low simmer there, not helped by Save Tiflis disordering everything.


End of Turn 2.

Turn 3 had bad news: Parvus went to Berlin. However, I got a couple more divisions ashore at Abadan, and at the end of the turn eliminated the tribe that was holding the flank at Ahwaz. At the beginning of turn 4, the two move-6 units at Abadan raced forward to cut off the Turks in Basra, and got just short of Baghdad. Jason SRed divisions in to block further progress, and I pulled back before he could cut off my leading units, and consolidated, eliminating two divisions at the end of the turn from OoS. Jason used Marsh Arabs to tie me up a bit, but I cleared them out over the next couple of turns. Both Indian corps got formed in there, and the next turn would have seen me trying to get him out of Nasiriya and get on the road to Baghdad again, hopefully threatening to cut off more divisions in the process.

My main problem was the Russian Front. A Winter Offensive helped on Turn 3, but while I’d been able to chew up a decent number of Turkish units and tribes, I hadn’t gained much ground, and Jason was able to take and eliminate the fort in Kars. I had managed to move the east flank up to take Van and threaten Mosul, which had caused more reshuffling of units, but I had to keep being cautious of getting my supplies cut off, since a neutral Persia really limits routes into the area. At the end of next turn the Revolution would hit, and there was no possibility of delaying it.

Also, I was going to lose the VPs for Romania. I tried to play it on Turn 6, and got through all of setup before realizing that I needed a LCU in the Balkans, which I had no way of doing. So it wasn’t going to get played before the Revolution. And slightly later, Jason did play Bulgaria. No action actually happened in the Balkans, but the theater was finally open.


End of Turn 6, and the day.

So we left the day with Jihad stalled at 4, and none of the revolt events played, and the VPs slightly on the AP side. But the Revolution was going to give me a really hard time, and start freeing up TU troops for other crises.

And there were some. I was going to be pressing forward in Mesopotamia. Also, a big problem had been dealing with the invasion cards (I had two during the winter turn 5), and getting decent British troops for an invasion together. I had originally planned on trying a Gallipoli invasion, but Jason had denuded eastern Anatolia of troops (except for one elite division in Adana), so I was planning on invading at Adana next turn. And of course, I’d make what use I could of the Russians in the time left me.

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His Majesty’s Dragon

by on June 2, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Napoleonic naval adventure plus dragons. That does pretty well sum it up.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. I’ve gotten lots of recommendations for this book, but have put off trying out for a long time as while the high concept is one that could be a lot of fun, it’s also one that could go disastrously wrong, especially if you know something of the history of the era.

Thankfully, it does work, and there is some nice worldbuilding around making it all work. Once into the main part of the book, the sharp-eyed will soon see that it is 1805 (I recall no year being given in the novel), and the campaign that ends in the Battle of Trafalgar is in motion.

But this is about dragons, and not ships, so that’s not the focus nor climax of the novel, even though it provides a very good framework for some of the action. Instead, we have an introduction to the world of dragons (which is conveniently gauche enough that our ship captain main character needs as much introduction to the Aerial Corps as we do), with training, integrating with a unit and social norms, etc. This is a lot of the backbone of the center of the book, and is well done with a fairly appropriate feel for the society of the era without going overboard in it (not that I’m an expert, but it sure felt true to what I know).

The dragons are intelligent, and therefore characters in their own right, as well varied in form and function, having been bred for different roles about as much as dogs have been. You can’t stare at them too long, as there’s no way for a smaller dragon to really work without a fair amount of magic (and so far there seems to be none past the dragons and some having breath weapons of fire and acid and the like), and most of the dragons here are huge. A true ‘combat dragon’ carries a load of marines (for boarding actions) and gunners to fire at the enemy, along with gear and tackle for all them, and the space to put it all… goodness. There’s a number of nods the problems inherent in all this, but just enjoy it and don’t think too hard about it. But the tone is small ship actions, not fighters (though there’s some of that too, since the dragons attack each other directly as well).

That was a lot of what gave me pause going into this, but it works out. The characters are well worth reading about, the action is well done, and overall the plot works out very well. Certainly recommended.

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Stormblood

by on May 29, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

Smudge and I recently finished off the main story for Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood. I’m amazed, I figured we’d still be at it when the Shadowbringers expansion comes out at the beginning of July. Not that we’re caught up or anything, there’s five big patches of content to get through too. If we take three months on that… we’ll be about a month behind when the expansion comes out.

First off, the Stormblood storyline features a fair amount of travel. And they provide a pretty decent map of the world as it’s been revealed so far:


↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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