The Four Vassal War Alliance Turn 5

by on June 7, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Four Vassal War

Crossposted from the SFU blog on BGG.

The Alliance gained 0.8 VP for holding four Lyran provinces at the beginning of the turn. Three were held by the Hydrans who had been left alone by the Lyrans, while the fourth was held by the Kzinti, thanks to a poor SSC roll last time. That had also stranded an important part of the Lyran fleet out of position, which was to have grave effects.

Construction was fairly normal, though both the Kzintis and Hydrans showed defensive concerns upgrading planet defenses, and the Hydrans built a new Monitor (for 0519), and provided all their monitors with carrier pallets.

Builds:
Kzintis: BC, 2xCL, DD, 3xFF, 3xPDU upgrades
Hydrans: DG, 2xKN, CR, 2xCU, MON, 3xMPV, RN->LM, 2xPDU upgrades

Both raids hit the Lyrans again. The Hydran raid continued to pick on province 0107, but the called up POL forced a retreat. Meanwhile, the Kzintis tried to raid a hex that already had a POL, but I was still able to call up a POL and the pair of them crippled the Kzinti CL.

Movement was brutally direct: Bel moved just about everything available onto the two main Lyran SBs, while avoiding contact elsewhere. On the Hydran border, this was simple, and expected, as major portions of the Hydran fleet were still adjacent to the SB. In Kzinti space, Bel first first pinned my main fleet in front of the SB before moving everything else in. I had managed to pin a couple of his larger scouts out before that, but it was to be of little real use.

This left me with one active reserve (one being pinned in 0404, and all the Klingon reserves were well out of range), which I sent to 0404 in the hopes of saving the Kzinti-border SB.


The Kzinti assault.


The Hydran assault.

Combat:
0705: SSC: Lyran: POL destroyed
0604: Lyran: Crip CA; Kzinti: crip CLD
0404: Lyran: dest SB, 2xCL, 5xDD, 8xFF, (stored) MB, crip BCE, 2xCA, 4xCL, 4xDD; Kzinti: dest CC, 5xCS, 3xCD, CL, CLG, 2xFF, SF, crip DNE, 2xTTB, FF, SF, DF
0504: Lyran: crip 3xDD; Kzinti: crip BC, CL
0411: Lyran: dest SB, DD, DDG, FF, POL, SAS, FTS, (stored) MB, crip CC, CA, 2xCL, CLG, DD, capture LN; Hydran: dest TGB, TGT, DG, PT

0404 went seven messy rounds before I retreated behind the barely surviving SB, with both sides at max BIR, and generally getting high rolls. The Kzinti generally had 9-11 EW available, and I had to boost the SB’s EW just to keep the die shift to -1. I contemplated directing on the CDs to lower the EW deficit, but dropped damage to try and force the Kzinti fleet off. He did self-kill a couple at the beginning, and I should have followed up by killing another after that. Bel should have killed the CLS I put on the line to force the -2 shift, or forcing my SB to minimal ComPot. He did a troop assault every round, and managed to kill the inherent G. As I didn’t have any troop ships in the hex, I bought a G for the SB a couple rounds before letting it go (they both did their job of absorbing a loss/SIDS).

0411 didn’t have sufficient forces on it after last turn’s assault; I had planned for the reserve to go there, but saving 0404 seemed the safer bet. However, the Lyran 2-EW SCs and poor Hydran EW allowed me to generate a -2 shift on the Hydrans. This time I concentrated on killing key units (mostly tugs) for four rounds before retreating behind the SB.

The Lyran fleet is is really bad shape (there are four uncrippled DDs left), but Alliance losses have generally been bigger, and it’s possible for them to get going again. But the Klingons are going to be carrying the war for the Coalition in the meantime. Last turn, I was expecting to see not a lot of major moves; I’m going to have to figure out how to get out of this hole.

Destroying a SB is 8 VPs, and incurs another 8VP penalty in bases that need replacing. Both our totals for enemy ships destroyed have shot up, though I retain a healthy lead there. Technically, my repair needs are down, and the Klingons are about to get to cycle through a number of them, but the Lyrans won’t have much to do.

In all, the Alliance is up to 142.4 VPs, and most of it isn’t going away. With all the ship kills, the Coalition is up to 113.85 VPs. This is near the top end for a Minor Victory for the Alliance, and if they can keep up this kind of momentum, might have a chance at a Major victory.

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King’s Dragon

by on June 3, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Ages ago, I started reading Kate Elliot’s Crown of Stars series, but lost track of just which book I had gotten up to, and so kept putting the rest of the series off. I’ve just started rereading the books to remind myself of what happened.

The general setup of the world is based on actual early medieval history, say around AD 900. The kingdoms of Wendar and Varre (where the bulk of the series takes place) obviously occupy what would be Germany, the Eika (savage non-humans with tough metallic-looking skin, and bony claws on the back of their hands) take the place of vikings, the church is powerful in society, there’s remnants of the Dariyan (Roman) Empire all over, etc.

But, in the details, there’s a lot of worldbuilding going on. The Church of Unities worships a duality Lord and Lady, which promotes more of a ‘separate but equal’ look at the gender divide (generally, women run the household, and therefore serve as all the biscops (sic), but there are warrior women and administrative men as well). There is magic (but of course!), which the church is of two minds about (well, that attitude is historical). A nice conceit is a somewhat more formalized royal retinue, with messengers being ‘Eagles’, infantry ‘Lions’ (with a reference to chess pawns being called lions as well), and heavy cavalry called ‘Dragons’.

As with anything this large, there is a large cast of characters, but for the first half of the book, there are two viewpoint characters in alternating chapters, who both follow the typical epic fantasy ‘zero-to-hero’ arc. Alain quickly ends up at the lowest rung in a lord’s household, and steadily moves up. I found Liath the more engaging character, because of her more studious background, but she suffers abuse that is hard to take. Her arc is also less developed here; it moves forward, but it’s hard to see where it will go.

The plot proper gets going in the second half of the book, and the scope and number of viewpoint characters expands rapidly, dealing with both a major rebellion and and the Eika besieging a major city at the same time. One of the new characters is a secondary character from the first half, but the others are new (though mentioned before), including the Dragon of the title and cover. In general, the two plots are well handled in tandem, though one takes up much more time than the other. Ironically, Alain’s ‘screen time’ goes down even though he’s in the dominant plot, as it also features two new viewpoint characters.

In the end, both storylines hit either an end, or a good stopping point, giving the book a good sense of closure. Alain’s arc also feels finished, as he rides off away from the promise of further action, even though it’s obvious that his life is not destined to be so simple….

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The Enterprise of England

by on May 30, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Ended up with something of a surprise gaming session with Jason and Mark this Saturday. After a little debate, we settled on a game of GMT’s Blackbeard, which hasn’t gotten to the table in quite a while. We went for the ‘long game’ option, though we ended up cutting it a bit short as we were delayed by Jason being a bit late, and we had to do a lot of rule checking since we hadn’t had any real prep time.

With a three player game, we can have up to three pirates on the board at once, but everyone opted to just place two and keep the third in reserve. I placed my two at the far ends of the board—North Atlantic and India—while Jason centered around the Caribbean and Mark placed one on the Gold Coast (and the other… I think in the South Atlantic zone). Jason cycled through a decent number of captains during the game. His most successful one retired, but at least one went down to a King’s Commissioner (mine), one was replaced by a successful mutiny, and one lost a duel with one of Mark’s captains. One of his captains also had major trouble with repeated storms in the East Caribbean. Mark was a lot more stable, fending off a mutiny, though he lost a captain to another of my King’s Commissioners, and taking over ships from both Jason and me with successful duels (the latter with Blackbeard himself).

For quite a while, it seemed I wasn’t doing much. I positioned my best captain (Edward England) in India, and despite an Ability of 4, I had a heck of a time spotting merchant ships (2/3rds chance, and I was about 2 for 8); thankfully, I didn’t have any competition, and new merchants trickled in at about the rate I could nab them. My booty rolls weren’t that great either, though several of the ships were good, and I kept rolling high on the notoriety gain. I ended up trading up to a brigantine shortly before a King’s Commissioner showed, and installed Heavy Guns to be able to beat him, a warship that showed up (we used the original printed values for warships and KC), and loot the port of Goa (with information provided by a hostage). This led to a retirement with 48 Notoriety and about… 5200? in net worth, which shot my low score well past everyone else.

My other captain had a 1 Initiative, so he was a poor choice for any cards that determined actions by that score, and I mostly ignored him until after England retired. I managed a couple decent prizes with him, and defeated another King’s Commissioner before retiring him. My third captain finally came into play at this point, who was defeated by Blackbeard shortly before we broke up for the day.

Jason ended the day with 76 VPs, Mark had 134, and I had… 233. It sure didn’t feel like a huge win like that was possible with my frustrating beginning, but once England got going, he became impossible to stop, and raked in a huge score by himself. And despite the overall relearning the system nature of the game, I think we learned a lot on successful play. Anti-pirate play picked up a lot as we went along (to levels not seen before), and warships are handy for wearing down a good captain until a King’s Commissioner can take him out.

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Wars of Empire

by on May 26, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Douglas Porch’s book on imperialism and warfare is meant as an introductory book on the subject, but I don’t think it serves that job very well. Organized around general subjects of how European vs non-European wars worked in the 18th and 19th Centuries is skips around too much for an unfamiliar reader to really get a good grasp of the events talked about.

Now, not a lot of background is really needed, as long as the reader has some sense of the course of events already, the book will be very easy to follow. It does go into the why of those events quite well, and the book is an excellent ‘next step’ once some general background is known. Wars of Empire is a long thought-essay (though a short book) on how Europe came to control so much over those two centuries. He goes into such things as why so many indigenous peoples completely failed to resist Western Imperialism, despite having access to many of the same tools (especially in the 18th Century, while firearms were still relatively simple to operate and maintain). He points out how Imperial expansion was often politically unpopular, and often came only by the actions of commanders posted far away from home (it is a pity he didn’t step outside his time frame to point out how the Japanese Army in Manchuria operated the same way). There’s some important things talked about here, but not necessarily enough context. I’d also like to see a detailed study of some part of all this to demonstrate that events actually work the way he says, instead of just drawing general conclusions from general trends.

Also, I have the Endeavour Press Kindle edition of the book, and it has suffered a bit. It’s much cleaner than a lot of OCR translations I’ve seen, but there’s still a few flubs (and about two cases where I could not figure out what the original word was), and a high number of dropped periods (which is not something I’ve seen before). What makes this especially surprising is that the original book was released in 2000, so I would have supposed electronic files would still exist, instead of needing to scan.

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Soaring to a Win

by on May 22, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had most of the regulars over on Saturday for our regular FtF gaming (Patch missed out by being ill; get better Patch!), going for Dominant Species this time. We did our usual method of handing out the animals randomly, with the Birds (which for whatever reason usually gets skipped in our random draws) going to Mark, Jason getting the Insects, Dave getting Amphibians, and Mammals going to me.

I mostly tried to set up for later in the game in the first turn or two, and felt that it had gone poorly. I didn’t feel like I had gained any sort of advantage over anyone else, and had passed over gaining points, putting me well behind anyone else. Jason had gotten a decent lead, followed by Dave, both off of double-scoring. Somewhat surprisingly, there had been no glaciation action the first turn (Jason tended to a heavy Glaciation/Survival strategy early on, but has since gone on to other strategies), and Dave ended up with the Survival card for the first time in all his plays.

4-Turn-1
After the first turn.

After that, my position improved, and my scored passed Mark’s by one point on turn 3, and stayed there on turn 4. I was picking up decent number of dominances across the board, and eventually realized that it was because meat was the most common element on the board, and I had adapted to sun and grass, which were also common. The points spread had gotten really wide during the first few turns, but Dave started catching up to Jason in the middle game, and I came out of the cellar (passing Mark as mentioned), and started climbing towards them.

4-Turn-4
After turn four. My meat-sun-grass combo is paying off at the wrong time….

One thing that decidedly affected the game is that both Intelligence and Parasitism came up early, and the player most easily skipped by them got the first choice at them (i.e., the person who would miss the action pawn if anyone other than them picked the card), so everyone had five action pawns from the second turn, and six from about turn four. On the last turn things got very crowded as all the action pawns combined with the choices that no longer had meaning were abandoned. Also, all of us had a fairly easy time getting all our species  on the board. I tried a somewhat risky strategy of getting everything out during the middle game, and still had a decent population at the end.

During the last couple turns, my surge in points and obvious dominance possibilities came to an end as events conspired to make me lose adaptation elements, and a last-place position in the initiative (I had put myself in third on the first turn, but Mark had put me back in fourth with Nocturnal) locked me out of Adaptation, leaving me with four elements to work with. As my dominance (heh) of the board faded, Mark, who had started doing better over the last couple of turns started emerging with a number of dominances across the board.

As it turned out I had one final choice at the end of the game. I had the final scoring position, and as we had had an even five cards available, Ice Age had not yet been taken. I could easily score a tied-dominance title and try to gain a victory I fairly obviously wasn’t going to get this turn. But I felt that next turn would be worse, not better, for me and ended the game. Mark had gotten up to eight dominances, and the bonus points pushed him up to a 134-point win. Dave and Jason had five dominances and also tied at 125 points. I only had four (if I could have moved a bit more to keep from getting knocked off a couple tiles, it would have been more), and came in fourth at 121.

4-Turn-7
End game.

The early game featured a ~30 point gap at one point, so this relatively close set of scores was very startling. Also, this is the highest overall scoring game we’ve seen yet. This is also the second game in a row that ended about a turn or so after I really needed it to. Though this time I got a clearer idea of just how some of this happened (popular elements), and I hope to be able to manipulate the dominance situation a bit better next time.

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