Dune

by on February 6, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve been meaning to read Dune for decades now, but the thick paperback on my dad’s shelf always intimidated me a little. I’ve had some knowledge of the book, being aware of the Avalon Hill game and having started Westwood’s Dune II once. And none of the expectations that were generated by those were wrong.

Overall, it’s a very good book, though there were some concerns. I didn’t have too many problems figuring out the general outline of the story from near the beginning. Some of that is just because I have some idea what I’m getting into, but considering all that’s going on, I have to wonder if a certain amount of ‘telegraphing’ was intentional on Herbert’s part as a mirror to Paul’s own abilities to sense the future. However, the final climax has an extremely sudden raising of the stakes that feels out of place. There is an explanation, but it comes down to a single line much later, and the entire end just feels extremely disjointed from the rest of the book, since it is a situation that several points in the rest of the book say won’t happen.

The worldbuilding is very good, with the exception of being another SF setting with a time scale that is unlikely, with institutions existing for thousands upon thousands of years. But that’s a somewhat common feature of SF of the time. And it’s easy to ignore for all the things that are well done. Arrakis is that staple of SF, the one-terrain planet. But there’s a lot of nuance put into that terrain and ecology, and some very good inventions mixed in with parts that are more familiarly terrestrial. As the focus of the book, no other world gets any sort of real detail, but what is needed is given, and we’re shown just enough to see that it exists.

I can’t unreservedly praise Dune, but it is very well written, and certainly one everyone needs to read at some point.

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Konya wa Hurricane Alliance Turn 13

by on February 2, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Konya wa Hurricane

Crossposted from the SFU blog on BGG.

With the various problems Byron’s been handing me lately, the Alliance economy grew 20 points for this turn. That was mostly from the Federation, which is getting (devastated) income from two minor planets again, and controlled another 6 provinces than last turn. The Kzinti and Hydrans were up slightly, while the Gorns are suffering a couple contested provinces to make up for the NZ hexes they’re grabbing.

Builds:
Federation: DN+, 10xNCL, LTT, NSC, 14xFF, CP, NCL->NSC, DD->DE, 4xFF->FFE
Kzinti: 3xCM, LTT, 3xFFK, 5xFF, BC->CV, FFK->FKE
Hydran: TG, RN, 2xHR, LTT, 4xCU, 3xHN
Gorn: CCH, BC, CM, 2xHD, LTT, 2xBD, 3xDD, CP

That said, there’s still enough pressure on the Alliance to suppress expensive ship builds. The Kzinti didn’t build any of their large ships, and kept producing regular FFs and MCs despite having DWs and NCAs on the schedule, though they did convert a CV. The Hydrans finally have a shipyard again, and are spending their way through their stockpile.

The Hydrans did their usual two raids in the east end of their space, but I finally had things set up so that he couldn’t knock out my control of the provinces, and I forced a RN to retreat, maintaining full control over that province (crippling a F5 in the process). Both Kzinti raids were successful, and knocked the Lyrans out of a province again. The Federation only performed two raids, but knocked out the garrison of just recaptured 1910 to make that planet neutral again, as well as killing a province raider. The Gorn raids hit Romulan province holders, and again, both of them blew their cloaked evasion rolls, but he only crippled one in combat.

The Hydrans, possibly emboldened by having proper ship construction, came boiling out of their on-map planet, and pinned all the in-theater Lyran forces on the way to sending a large force to the Lyran SB in 0411. Actually, this is probably a consequence of not having any reserves in the area, but with how bad things are going elsewhere, there was too much need for the reserves elsewhere. The main Kzinti fleet also moved out (complete with auxiliaries) to retake 1202. Other elements stuck into Lyran space to take out a border BATS, and of course re-take 1802.

The latter included the Marquis’ Fleet, pulling the Kzinti back from their involvement in Federation space. The Federation struck at NE Klingon space again, attacking the Klingon supply tug for the area. A major portion of the 3rd Fleet headed to the interior of Federation space to confront various Klingon forces I’d left there, and I reacted onto the BATS that had been damaged last turn, which developed into a fairly major action. Forces in that area swept up other forces, and struck at the major Klingon staging point of 2715.

Offensives in the area of Romulan space were more subdued. The only major move was against the planet in 3711, though strikes were also made against the NZ planet in 3912 and two border BATS.


Hydran revenge.


Kzinti-Federation offensives.


Against the Klingons.


Strikes along the Romulan border.

My main central reserves on the Northern Reserve SB paid out, with one going to help the fight over the supply tug, and the B10 going to a small battle to get it as far into Federation space as I easily could. The Romulans sent a reserve to save the NZ planet, and everything else was pinned in place, with the exception of a Lyran reserve near the 3rd Fleet SB, which was out of range of everything.

Battles:
0211: SSC: Lyran: dest POL
0312: SSC: Lyran: dest CONV, POL
0317: SSC: Lyran: dest DW
0702: SSC: Lyran retreat
1708: Klingon: dest CONV
2008: Federation: dest CFF
3311: SSC: Romulan: dest SNB
3510: SSC: Romulan: crip K5L; Federation retreat
3809: SSC: Romulan: dest K5, crip SK; Federation retreat
3912: Federation: dest FF
5010: Romulan: dest BATS; Gorn: crip HCD
4808: SSC: Romulan retreat
0411: Lyran: dest SB, FF, SAV, FTS, FRD, crip 2xCW, 4xDW; Hydran: crip TR, 2xLNH, DDS
0116: Lyran: dest CW; Hydran: dest HR
0415: Lyran: dest CA, DWE; Hydran: dest 2xLN, capture DWE
0412: SSC: Lyran: dest POL; Hydran retreat
0502: Lyran: dest BATS, POL; Kzinti: crip MEC, FKE
0602: Lyran: crip CL; Kzinti: crip FF
1202: Lyran: dest FF, LAV, SAV, FTS, crip 4xCW, 6xDW; Kzinti: dest 2xBC, crip MEC, capture planet
1802: Lyran: dest CWE, crip TCB, CV, CWE, FF; Kzinti: dest EFF, crip FKE, capture planet
1702: Kzinti: dest POL
1601: Kzinti: dest cripFF
1809: Lyran: dest STT; Federation: dest FFE
1907: Klingon: crip F5E; Federation: crip 2xFF
2705: Klingon: dest F5L; Federation: crip FF
2609: Klingon: crip D7C, 3xD5, 2xF5; Federation: dest BATS
2712: SSC: dest F5
2810: Klingon: dest cripD6, cripD5, 2xcripF5; Federation: crip CFF
2715: Klingon: dest F5L, FRD, crip 3xD5, 2xF5; Federation: crip NCL, DE, 2xFF, 2xFFE
3207: Romulan: crip SUB, KE; Federation: crip CL, FF
3711: Romulan: dest KRM, SPC, crip SP, WE; Federation: dest SWAC, crip DN+, FFE; Gorn: dest BDE
4010: Romulan: dest KE; Gorn: dest BC, crip BD

4808 was an odd fight, as he pinned a province raiding SNB with a POL, giving me a slight edge in the battle. But I still rolled a ‘2’ to retreat while the POL was unharmed.

With just a few more ships the Lyrans could have held SB 0411. The Hydrans brought enough spare fighters for a couple rounds, and by the time they were out and losing fighter power on the line, nearly the entire Lyran fleet was already crippled. With some fresh ships, it would have started hurting.

I had a POL with the BATS in 0502, which I used to force an extra round of meaningful combat with the BATS, and he directed on the POL rather than let it retreat behind the base. He then did a fighting retreat over my province raiders from 0702 which had retreated into the NZ, but could only force a cripple on the CL, which I’ll try to get back into service as something bigger….

I had left too many big ships in the small garrison at 1802, so I had to fight it out a round, or throw away one of the big ones against a solid Kzinti fleet. The CV may get converted to a CVD, or just repaired and returned to the front. In the meantime, I did a fighting retreat over a POL and FF to destroy them for fighters, and ended up on 1502, which will allow the cripples to Strat back to real facilities.

As expected, Byron hit the supply tug in 1809 hard, but there was also a pinning battle in 1907, with a TAV3 (TGA+2xVP3) group, and I expected he’d retreat onto that. He didn’t, to stay in 1907, which allowed me an almost-even battle there (helped by having fighters to absorb damage).

I had reacted a bunch of ships onto BATS 2609, which I had damaged on my turn, and finished if off here. Byron wasn’t sure if he was happy that I’d had to fight the BATS twice, or upset that he’d let me take it out on his turn. The downside was it had meant abandoning a pile of cripples in 2810, which he wiped out.

2715 was another case of catching me with too few ships available, and he killed a forward FRD that I’ve been counting on. I was worried that he might try to take out the BATS there as well, but he would have completely wrecked his force in the attempt.

Byron more-or-less just pinned the trapped Romulan force in 3207, and realized later that he needed to pay more attention to it, as even out of supply it still had decent ComPot (26 to his 41). Crippling the SUB wasn’t what I really wanted, but it’s a single ship to repair, it’s buried in an intact group, and it was already out of fighters.

After discounting the 100 points my tenuous hold on the Hydran capital, the VPs for the turn show just how much my grip is slipping:

Coalition: 429.4 EP (x2) + 589 (bases) + 841 ships (/5) + 100 (Hydran Capital) = 1884.2
Alliance: 324.6 EP (x2) + 500 (bases) + 715 ships (/5) = 1435.2

That’s still a Decisive Victory, but it goes down to Major without the capital, which I probably won’t have next turn. The Alliance still has some major problems to overcome, but Byron is prying the strategic initiative from me all over the board. The Romulans are in many ways my best hope, and their navy is a bit fragile yet.

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Equipping Erza

by on January 29, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Life

My main destop machine has been Horo for just about eight years now. The primary parts were inherited from a friend, and I figure the processor is probably close twelve years old. Until about six months ago, this has been sufficient for almost anything I’ve needed to do. In MMOs, my machine has been notably slower than Smudge’s Myzal, but it runs everything. Any other games were fine, etc.

The main exception was the site for where I work (CNET) was a bit heavy, though the back-end tools are nicely minimal. However, I’ve been noticing that browsing has been taking more and more resources lately (the recent Firefox refresh didn’t seem to do anything about speed, but memory use went up). And I started a large Vassal F&E game, and the module wants a lot of memory as the number of objects goes up. Since we started in mid-war, when the number of ships has gone up, I started noticing. Horo’s motherboard can only take 4 GB of RAM (which is what it has), and that was becoming my biggest problem.

So I’ve been paying more attention to hardware lately, and decided to replace my system at the start of this year. Smudge’s new case was very nice (and she tried to talk me into just getting another one), but a bit pricey. I had some hope for one of Corsair’s more cut-rate offerings, but the power switches on them are awful, so I abandoned that idea. I ended up with a Zalman Z9 Neo case. It turned out fairly well at a good price, but there are a few problems: It features pass-throughs for better cable management (a trend I really approve of), but the rubber grommets are thin, and come off way to easily. The drive cage is nice, but there’s only room for two regular 3.5″ drives. That’s enough, but I’d like a third for backup. On the other hand, it comes with five case fans. I’ve only bothered to hook up three so far, as I shouldn’t need more.

I ordered the main parts from Amazon, who initially estimated three weeks for delivery, and then cut it down to two weeks, with the package expected on the 18th. It showed up on the 13th. I had been planning on a leisurely 4-day weekend to get everything together, but with the parts already here, and Monday a holiday, I started then.

The four-day weekend would have been better. This was a problem-filled build.

First, to no real surprise, Horo’s copy of Windows refused to boot when stuck into the new system. Going into the Windows install application also showed that one of my RAM sticks was defective (confirmed with Window’s RAM diagnostic later; I got it replaced that night). I lost more data than I anticipated wiping C: for a new install as a lot of programs seem to want to store things in subfolders of My Documents, which I ignore. But Windows 7 installed… I put in the motherboard driver disk to for utilities there… and despite taking a lot of time saying things were happening, nothing did. My current diagnosis is that the disk has two copies of the AMD video drivers, in place of the chipset driver. After wondering if I was going to get forced onto Win 10, I got the disk’s networking driver to install, and grabbed the proper Win 7 chipset driver from another machine on the network.

That got most things up and going, including USB, so I could actually get off my emergency PS/2 keyboard (and have a mouse). But when I installed drivers for the video card, I got a BSOD. I was able to use a restore point to get the system back, but that required the Win 7 disk, and I was back to no USB support for that. Three different sources of drivers (nVidia auto detect, Windows Update, and picking my card specifically) all did this, and I ended Monday with a system that just wasn’t working.

Either the card died when I removed it from Horo, or the slot just isn’t aligning properly. The far end locks down correctly, but there is a noticeable angle as it moves to the back of the system and the bracket. I’d like to try it back in Horo, but I’ll need to install other things looted from her (like a hard drive). Smudge has been feeling guilty about not getting me a Christmas present (she got sick before completing a scarf for me), and took me shopping for a new video card. Sadly, Fry’s selection was looking picked over, and the choice came down to a card a bit less powerful than I’d like, and one twice as expensive, and not worth it.

I installed the new card, and much to my relief it worked. (I had tried a secondary slot on the motherboard with the old card with no more luck, so I was getting reasonably certain that the motherboard was not to blame.) I took Wednesday off, and finally got the machine fully functional, and started installing everything.

One final problem: Microsoft is denying Windows 7 support to the most recent processors. I’ve got a small ‘fix’ in that keeps Windows Update functioning properly, but it is possible I will migrate to Windows 10 sooner than otherwise.

So here is Erza:

AMD Ryzen 7 1700
ASRock AB350 Pro4
16 GB DDR4 RAM
MSi GT 1030

It’s a… bright system. The front panel USB slots light up as soon as the power supply is on, which is actually handy to check that. The stock AMD cooler has a red LED ring around the fan, and the AMD logo itself lights up. And the case itself has a clear window on the side, so this is quite visible. I’d rather do without it, but I am getting used to it at night.

I’ve been keeping the system monitor on, and memory usage has yet to go over about 11 GB, even with several things running, so I have a fair amount of room left. Also, this is only taking two of four slots on the motherboard, so I can bump it up in the future, hopefully when RAM prices come down a bit (RAM was my one case of sticker shock). Final Fantasy XIV is running a lot faster, with load times keeping up with Smudge’s system.

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A World Lit Only By Fire

by on January 25, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

William Manchester’s book is really an ode to his hero, Magellan. He’s not a bad hero to have, but I think Manchester gives him far too much credit. The real value however, is that Manchester is far more interested in establishing the world he lived in than examining the man. Considering how often it is difficult to get anyone willing to have the feel of a time period as their main subject, it raises the book a bit in my estimation.

However, ‘The Medieval Mind’ in the subtitle is an overstatement. There’s a brief establishment of his look at the medieval world at the start of the book, but most of it is really on the transition into the Renaissance. It’s well written, and tackles the subject fairly well, but there are problems. Most of the contemporary authors he quotes were probably doing so for moralizing purposes in the first place, and a lot of what is cited has a very distinct tone of ‘kids these days!’. So, the book paints a picture of a static society that was breaking down into license and abuse of power that is unlikely to be very accurate in either direction.

Its worth noting that he covers the earliest parts of the Reformation, and within limits, covers it better than Diarmaid MacCulloch’s large volume on the subject. He doesn’t go into the threads of intellectual thought that is the primary focus of the latter, but he covers the more temporal aspects of the early power struggle in a more readable, and I think, more complete, format.

The final section is on Magellan’s voyage, including a good grounding in what the original plan was, and where it went wrong: At the time, the Rio de Plata was known, and from its size, was assumed to be a passage to the Pacific, as it had been too large to explore thoroughly. It’s a very good summary of one of the great sea voyages of history.

In general, A World Lit Only by Fire is a good readable starting point for the history of the Renaissance, but a lot of nuance is decidedly not there. The general learned opinion is that his scholarship is too out date (I’ll note that Durant’s Story of Civilization looks to be the primary starting point of his opinions, which while great, is well over half a century old), though I don’t know of a more current ‘alternative’.

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Carrier Empire

by on January 21, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

After way too long, some of the local group finally got together for some FtF gaming last week. Patch was unavailable, and Dave was ill (and I was worried I’d have to cancel on account of illness), but me Mark and Jason got together for a game of Space Empires 4X.

We had a number of delays getting going, so despite hoping only three players would speed things along just a little, we only got to the 11th Econ phase. I had the setup area on the long side (as opposed to the two ‘corner’ ones, and was the only one who put his homeworld out in the middle of things. All our placements paid early dividends, with nearby planets (three of the six surrounding hexes of my home space had planets). I don’t think anyone’s planets formed an easy pattern for pipelines from there, though certainly we all built out some chains.

Mark ended up discovering two Space Wrecks just outside ‘home’ territory near the center. I tried to intercept him on the second one, but a black hole in the last space before it destroyed my (+1/0) scout, and that gave him enough time to recover both, one of which gave him a size upgrade, and the other gave him speed. I continued pressing in the area anyway, soon discovering that Mark had CAs already, and then I went the other way, discovering the same with Jason, who also started using exploration CAs shortly thereafter. This was more than troubling, since I didn’t even have DDs yet.

What had I been doing? Well, we had decided to go ahead and finally introduce the next advanced rule at the start of the session, which was carriers and fighters. I initially thought maybe I’d just get the initial point defense tech to stick on all the extra scouts I’d doubtless need to explore, but that was too expensive for a deeply speculative investment. So, I went for the initial fighter tech, and then concentrated on them, getting to fighter-3 before finally getting DDs.

It didn’t take long to see them in some combat, where they didn’t do too badly. The first fight against Mark went reasonably well, as all of my ships and fighters were +1/+1, and Mark didn’t have any bonuses. Things went less well against Jason’s more advanced fleet, but I was able to retreat the carrier itself, and eventually get it back home for more fighters.

Overall, Jason probably had the best position, partly fueled by exploring the big expanse of empty space in the corner between me and him, we me having no real way to get at it. I had managed to slowly trickle in a few 10-mineral markers as well as my 5-minerals, which helped fund everything. Mark sidled in, and shot up a colony, while I only reduced a 5 to a 3 in a return trip. If I wasn’t more-or-less the focus of attention, I think I could have done something with my position, and as it was, I should have been colonizing a deep-space barren in the center of the board shortly. A lot would probably depend on how well I could keep it.

Mark and Jason had a fight between their major fleets right as we ended for the day, where Jason’s advanced (+2/+1) BCs completely trounced Mark’s primitive CAs. We did an exhibition match between what was left of that fleet (Mark did kill a couple CAs) against my main fleet of 3xCV + 8xFtr. I lost all but one fighter, but took out his fleet, and if things had gone slightly different, I’d have still been able to pull out the CVs.

The carrier path is interesting as the CVs are just SCs that cost twice as much. But the fighters can be on an even footing to anything up to a BC. Jason would have had BBs soon, and that would be a problem, though probably not an insurmountable one. Being able to pull out the expensive CVs after losing most of your firepower is a nice bonus, but you’ll lose lots of fighters, and resupply efforts will probably stall a lot of offensives. At the same time, the tech is expensive, so getting good fighters will keep you from getting better ships. On the other hand, point defense is about as expensive, so empires looking for a solution to fighter swarms will get strangled there too. Finally, the fighters will chew up a lot of yard capacity, which had me take to shipyard-2 at the end, after buying a number of extra shipyards (I actually usually take it early-ish, but was too cash-starved by paying for fighter tech and CVs). I’m really happy with having gone with CVs, but I miss the bigger ships….

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