Speak Softly and Carry a Big Ship

by on January 9, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Patch made it over again for one final FtF game day of 2018 on the 29th. I had just gotten my own copy of Space Empires 4X, and we arranged to play that, which meant a lot of hurried counter clipping. I knew he had played it before, but a look at my logs showed that it had just been once in an early game. This was a surprise, and meant there was a lot more teaching to be done than I had supposed.

I had some surprises as well, as I’ve never really looked through the 2-player scenarios before. I went with the ‘normal’ 2-player map (I was thinking in terms of the ‘extra large’ map and didn’t realize those smaller arrangements existed; a separate ‘normal’ 2-player map could be an interesting addition to another expansion). And naturally, we stuck to the basic rules. …And we still had more than enough rules goofs along the way. A fair number were powered by my brief description of the rules and how things worked (Patch didn’t realize there was a difference between ship hull size, and hull size tech, for instance… different terms would have been nice). He bought Move 2 early in the expectation that it would speed up his mining ships… which it didn’t (and of course, the question didn’t come up until the third movement turn after he bought it…). It still affected the game, as I had to be careful that he didn’t slip around me and hit a vulnerable target on turn 3….

Colonization got off to a slow start for both of us, as it took a while to find even three inhabitable planets (our respective barren planets both showed up early). Patch got unlucky and lost a SC to his black hole, and I got lucky and survived when I found mine a couple turns later. I then started losing SCs to the deep-space markers, including the black hole I found first. But overall, luck went my way with three planets in the first line of deep space on my border, which I immediately colonized. Patch, ironically found both a Space Warp ‘1’ and ‘2’ on the same turn (okay, that was an optional rule we used; they’re so simple I don’t even think of it as such).


Situation when we broke for lunch; I’m blue, Patch is green.

Eventually, a second Space Warp 2 was found, which had a large effect on the game, as it led from near the middle on my right, to on Patch’s border on my left. I had been more economically successful (though a combination of knowing what I was doing and accidents of astrography), and the initial fighting happened out in the middle on my right. There was a number of things in the area, including several of my colonies, and a new one for Patch. My handful of CAs prevailed over his DDs (partly through luck, though luck for both of us was uniformly bad in early combats leading to a number of ships retreating away from revealed fleets). And I managed to get in and destroy a couple colonies (with more effort than it should have needed, thanks to more lousy die rolls).

And then… I had a string of disastrous combats, and most of my fleets were lost without doing anything, including a 3xDD group (high-tech, and of my bigger ship concentrations). Patch mostly stayed defensive, even as I panicked about what all those unseen flipped over ship counters could do. (Quite likely less than it looked, but it still intimidated me.) I managed to get a few ships put out there, with the aid of the forward shipyard I’d built up, and started building BCs because I was out of CA counters (all singletons, and most of them different).

That ended up breaking Patch. The counter offensive petered out, much as my initial offensive had. He was still generally using DDs, and they couldn’t keep up with the BCs. I burned him out of a couple more colonies, and Patch surrendered. It was getting late, and the difference in our economies was something he wasn’t going to overcome. He had gotten up to BCs, and had held a Tactics edge over me for most of the game (1 vs 0), but I’d just gotten up to Move 3 and BBs, and put one out on the last econ turn. Next time, I was going to finally get shipyard tech 2, so my size-4 forward yard could build two BBs a turn. I had a slight combat advantage (+2/+2 vs +2/+1), and would try to get to +3/+3 for the BBs when I could spare the money.


End game; we turned over four unexplored hexes near the camera to see what they were.

The real victory of course, is that Patch had a great time. The combination of grand sweep with fairly simple rules definitely appealed to him, and this game will go into the Vassal rotation.

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Penric’s Demon

by on January 5, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve finally dug through enough of my ‘haven’t read yet’ pile to start on Bujold’s novella series set in the World of Five Gods. And I will certainly be getting to the rest of the series. This hit all the to-be-expected notes from her, and was very enjoyable.

I will say it felt a bit short. As a novella, it takes what could be the introductory period of an overweight novel and keeps it at that. Penric slams into trouble at the very start, and then things kind of just move along, while the nature of the trouble gets explored a bit. And then there’s some action, and a final bit to resolve just where Penric’s life will go, and end. In one of those overweight books, that last would effectively be the end of the beginning. Here it’s the end.

I will say that Penric’s Demon suffers a bit from a lack of agency on Penric’s part. He’s largely swept along on events for decent parts of the book. However, that’s certainly not to say he’s not doing anything, and Bujold’s wit and character exploration certainly keep the entertainment up in what some people might find slow going. Also, we get another glimpse into how gods and saints work in this world, and I’ve always really enjoyed Bujold’s take on the subject. When we get some action, it comes very suddenly, and is just as well done, and then the end gets dropped on the reader right after; it’s something of an abrupt transition in pace.

As a shorter work, it’s probably as good a place to try out Bujold’s writing as any, and cheaper than most. As ever with her books, it’s fully independent of everything else, and all the strengths of her writing are on display here. The downside is that you’ll probably want more, like I do.

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2018 in Review

by on January 1, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Life

Well… it’s certainly been a year. At least it never felt like three months flashed by without warning.

Financially, I’m probably a bit behind where I started. Which is a shame, since most of the year things were improving for me. On the other hand, I’ve made three major electronics purchases, and I shouldn’t need to do that again any time soon. Back in January, I built Erza, my new desktop machine. That was more trouble-prone than I expected, and there were a few months of teething issues, but it’s settled down now, and is doing very well. The only loose ends are someday getting a better video card, and expanding the RAM further.

Mid-year I bought a new NAS as a house file-server. The one we had had filled up some time back, and I wanted something better than the ‘NAS of very little brain’ that we had. Luckily, I found an older WD model that had been sitting at Central Computer for years, and was heavily discounted. The bad news was that WD considers its warranty to have expired while sitting on the shelf, and the old NAS started failing a week before I was ready. But I salvaged almost everything, and storage is currently twice what it was, and is expandable from there. I hope to buy a 4TB drive for it this year, and use the current pair of 2TB drives (one is backing up the other) as a backup to it, doubling storage again.

Both of those were actually bought out of pocket, so it was the third that drove up the credit card. Azuna has been struggling this year, and I had to buy a replacement Type Keyboard last year and a power adapter for her early this year. The battery was not lasting as long, and was having trouble with charging… and then around September the touch screen started acting up. It would show a line of five touches constantly hitting it in a line across the screen, which would do all sorts of bad things to programs running, and interfered with actually using the touch screen. So, it was time for a replacement. Microsoft had a $300-off deal for a new Surface Pro 6 on Black Friday, and considering that I needed a replacement, I really couldn’t afford not to take it. So, now I have Sakura, which cost me less than Azuna did. I’m still getting used to the 3:2 screen, and seeing just what she can do, but so far so good, and I hope Microsoft has gotten better with their touch screens.

Sadly, gaming wasn’t much better this year than last. We had one group day in January, and Jason made it over for a couple of games around May (finally tried out Der Weltkrieg, which I definitely liked enough to want to try more, and I nearly went out and impulse bought a second game in the series). Patch made it over a couple of times in December, which was very nice, and I hope I’ll see a bit more of him during the new year. I spent around $250 on gaming this year, including transferring part of my old ASL set to Mark, and finally getting a copy of Armies of Oblivion (by far the single biggest-ticket item), which gets me all the WWII core sets (I am looking at getting the Korea module at some point). I also have a couple more things on preorder that I expect this year, and am in the final internal debate on whether to get Red Factories, which is about to come out. My F&E game continued to monopolize a lot of spare time, but has now been bumped down to low-priority, and I’m in one PBEM ASL game, and hope to have more this year.

My Dad and I started a weekly computer game night last year, and we were enjoying FreeOrion together (still recommended), but it’s not so good on networking, so we used a third party to tie us together for the game. And then that died on us early this year, and I couldn’t get a replacement service to work. I then got into Stellaris when it went on sale, and talked my Dad into trying that. He was hooked, and we’ve moved over to that for our Friday nights. I also got an urge for some of our older console stuff during mid-year, and actually finished Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Chronicles: Ring of Fates. The handheld stuff is on hold at the moment as it was interfering with reading time too much, and I’m currently busy with clipping counters in the time slot that should be Kingdom Hearts II, but I should start that soonish.

Smudge also got us back into FF XIV right around the turn of the year, and we’ve been adventuring in Eorzea ever since. I’ve been taking advantage of screenshoting, and have gone from no images from the game (and of my main, Rylea, who I really liked) to having nearly 700 images saved off…. I’ve been posting some of them in weekly summaries, and in occasional blog posts about what we’ve been doing.

The blog itself stayed on schedule this year, with only a few places where it was a fight to have something out, though I never got ahead of schedule. If I can get to writing several book reviews, I should have a pretty good backlog built up soon. This year I had 93 posts, and category count was: 43 in Books, 11 in Konya wa Hurricane, 9 in MMO, 6 in C&C Ancients, 5 each in Boardgaming, Computer Games, 4 in Anime, ASL, and 2 in Life, GURPS, SFB. This is the same as last year, but the counts have shifted around a bit. Folding up the subcategories gives 28 in Boardgaming, 14 in Computer Games, and 2 in RPGs. Once again, I need to get around to splitting up the Books category. I didn’t manage any RPG posts other than some more spells for GURPS Dungeons & Sorcery, and I don’t know if that’ll change at all this year. I did get the Paradox review project moving a bit after two years, but I’m currently stalled most of the way through the CK II review. It’s massive, and I hope I can finish it off soon. Boardgaming is down because of the FtF problems… and I really hope that gets better.

I exactly made my reading goal of 52 books again this year, though it took a fair amount of effort after I got way behind in mid-year. Some of it was falling off the comics bandwagon and not really getting any new graphic novels this year. Some of it was some large, slow-moving books. It’s hard to say what my top recommendations for the year are; there was not a lot of standouts. The entire Designers & Dragons series is very good, though I enjoyed the earlier volumes more, Kiln People ended up better than I expected, On a Red Station Drifting lived up to the good review I’d seen of it. The obvious ones (sequels, authors I’ve read a lot of) also lived up to expectations: Penric’s Demon was quite good, The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya was fun, Oath of Fealty was a good start of a sequel series to Paksenarrion, and better than the two prequels…. On the other hand, I had a fair number of serious disappointments: The Rise and Fall of Alexandria was much lighter than I was expecting, and riddled with obvious errors. A World Lit Only By Fire was a problematic screed, saved when the author talked about his hero, Magellan. Ornament of the World was also a lot lighter than I was hoping for; still good on the literary study end, but I wanted more of the history outside that. Red Mars was a book that stalled me for a bit, as I didn’t care for about half the characters.

So, going forward, more of the same at the blog here, and I need to start writing up some book reviews before they fade much more in my memory. I’m still trying to figure out how to absorb new books and games and other items I got for Christmas and during my yearly visit to my parent’s into my overcrowded place. Hopefully, I can actually recover some financially this year, but with all-new electronics on my part, that’s one source of expenses down.

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WO7 Hell for the Holidays

by on December 29, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

Patch made it over for some FtF gaming back on the 16th, and after some looking over the various things I’d gotten over the past few months, we ended up trying this scenario from Winter Offensive #3. It’s been a bad year for FtF, and I think this is only the fourth day I’ve had, and the first with just Patch.

The Americans are defending early in the Battle of the Bulge on the ‘double wide’ board that came with WO #3, with a forward force of three elite HS with MMG, BAZ, light AT gun, and a good number of “?”, while the bulk of the defenders are well behind them with five elite squads, another MMG, two BAZ, a DC, and some more “?”. In addition, they have four M5 Stuarts with a 9-1 AL, who start out in Motion. The Germans have six turns to take 7 hexes of stone buildings from near the middle of the board on, and have five elite squads and four elite HS to do it, supported with 3xPz IV, a JgPz IV, a SPW 251/9 and five SPW 251/1s. There is ground snow (we forgot about the movement penalty some near the middle of the game, but got it at the beginning and end), and crew survival is NA (we were wondering what that means for Passengers, but I suppose now that it’s just Crew survival is NA, not all crew survival rolls; i.e., not those for other than crews).

I had the attacking Germans, and mis-read things. First off, I didn’t realize the initial line of Americans was all HS instead of squads until writing this up. Even more importantly, I didn’t really think about timing issues until the end of the first turn, when I’d already dismounted the bulk of my forces. Patch had created two large Dummy stacks with his forward “?”, and it took me a while to catch on to the fact that with 7x”?” and my off-board entry this was even possible.

Patch had his own troubles. My best move of the first turn was parking the JgPz on the small hill in front, which meant it could shell most of his forward positions. Realizing I had already slipped behind schedule, on Turn 2 I rushed forward a Pz IV that still had riders so that it could get near some victory buildings. Of course, his ATG was set up boresighted on the obvious straight road. I raced through it, he fired, hit… 10 TK DR to bounce off the thin side hull! This roll was one that Patch regretted for quite some time. I quickly reshuffled forces to have a tank, SPW, and squad next to the ATG and outside CA.

Meanwhile, I was still hung up on the initial line of defenses. I was well aware of the fact there was a MMG in there, but not so aware that there were two large stacks of Dummies. My Turn 2 bold advance didn’t come to anything, as the American Sniper pinned the Riding HS shortly after it unloaded, and Patch burned the Pz IV with a BAZ shot from the rear. With him revealed in 65N2, he ended up slipping out the back before I could do much more. I finally realized that the intimidating-looking stack was Dummies, and rushed through the initial line on Turn 3.

Over on the other end of the line, I had sent two SPWs in as a way to hold off the Americans on that side, and they kept moving up. They were facing the forward MMG, and I knew one other stack was real (as it had stripped “?” from me) and I realized the remaining stack was more Dummies.

So, I engaged the ATG crew in Melee (won by me slightly later), I was pushing forward on the left with minimal forces, and I was advancing into some victory buildings on the right. But there was one major problem I couldn’t nail down: the Stuarts. Patch did a great job of shuffling them around to threaten important places every turn, while also keeping me from killing any of them. I bounced three shots off of walls that might have killed them, if I could have gotten him out from hull down. This distracted my remaining Pz IVs, and the JgPz while he slowly picked off nearly all the halftracks.

The game started slowly thanks to me being very slow for the second turn as I tried to turn my thinking around, and come up with ways to recover from my screw-up of the first turn. We went late, and did not finish, but did get through the fifth turn, and I think I might have just barely been able to get the required 7 stone hexes. But there’s no way I’d keep all of them during the following American Turn. Patch pointed out that he was worried that my PSK HS would go into the far corner and pick up a couple hexes there, which might have given me more of a fighting chance, but they had turned back to help with the 65R4 area. With another turn or two, things could get really exciting, as I had penetrated into the middle of 64 near the larger hill. I had no intention of actually going up there (too many Americans), but there were plenty of other stone buildings around to claim.

So I’m still kicking myself over not realizing that I needed to be ready for a full mobile armored assault until I finished my first turn. If I had it to do over, I might still dismount a fair number of troops, but certainly the squad+leader I dismounted in my rear (to sweep up my inevitable broken units) would have been part of the turn 2 rush. My somewhat broad approach apparently kept Patch off balance as he didn’t know where I was going. I did; the left was to help isolate the center, and that at least partially worked. If I’d been paying more attention to his OB, I would have gone a bit faster on turn 2 as I’d have realized that he had big Dummy stacks earlier.

Despite getting off on the wrong foot, at least I made a creditable stab at actually winning. Also, it took me a bit to warm up to what I was doing with armor again, but it was coming back to me fairly well by the end of the day.

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Perilous Dreams

by on December 26, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is… almost a novella collection; the third story is notably shorter, but the other three reach into novella length. The four stories all deal with the ‘dreamers’ of Ty-Kry: Women who can dream and, through a device, share those dreams with other people. These dreams are under the dreamer’s control, but are presented for the client’s entertainment, making this a mix of virtual reality and GMing an RPG (in 1969 for the original story!).

There’s some extra questions in the stories about just how ‘real’ all of these dreams really are. They are just dreams… except….

And of course, none of the stories are about the ordinary types of dreams of day-to-day business at Ty-Kry. All of these are about the exceptional cases. The first story, “Toys of Tamisan” (the only one previously published in a magazine, and it also appeared in High Sorcery), deals with Tamisan, who being a crossbreed of offworlder and native of Ty-Kry, is an unusual dreamer, and when she tries to present a scenario based on if Ty-Kry’s history had gone differently, things go sideways. She is not in control, the ‘NPCs’ are all doing their own thing, and there is a real question of just how real all of this really is. It ends with a leap into the unknown, and the second story, “Ship of Mist”, is a direct sequel, that technically doesn’t directly deal with the dreamers. Other than the background, the bulk of the plot could a fairly typical pulp adventure (and a good one).

With a few changes at the ending, there could have been more adventures with Tamisan, but the second story brings an end, and the next two are only related by using Ty-Kry and dreaming. The remaining two have viewpoint characters a bit outside of having a lot of knowledge of how the dreaming works goes in. The third one (“Get Out of My Dream”) questions how real these dreams again, as it is an attempt to use a dream to alter the past.

The fourth story, “Nightmare”, is the longest, and deals with the fact that someone is using these dreams to kill clients despite a good number of safety precautions. This attracts the attention of off-world authorities who send in an undercover team to uncover how it’s happening. This probably gives the best idea of how normal dreaming (which we haven’t seen much of) is supposed to go, but of course it immediately goes off the rails too. In addition to the previous VR+GM idea I mentioned before, there’s a quick digression into zombie plagues, decades before they became popular.

Overall, it’s a good set of stories. It’s concept-centric SF, with a good amount of action, and some treachery, and fairly solid plots. “Get Out of My Dream” is really all concept, which would be why I considered it the weakest of the lot. The real workings behind the concepts are not explored, and… there’s some sense it’s not necessarily well understood in-world either. This works well inside of a small number of stories, but I’m definitely curious as to how the entire concept of a machine to ‘share’ dreams came from, especially as people who can use it are rare (though the two Tamisan stories do imply that its at least related to other psychic powers).

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