Inside GMT Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Grumble Jones Desperation Morale Banzai!! Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsSmudge and I recently got through the latest Final Fantasy XIV expansion. Once again SquareEnix has done a good job. Considering that this is the start of a brand-new storyline, it can’t have the weight of something had a decade for them to build up to. But, they managed to surprise me again.
(I’m staying light on spoilers here, but there are spoilers ahead, more so as I go on.)
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After failing to rescue a corps HQ section, Patch and I returned to Hatten, where I took the attacking Americans in the fifth scenario. I’m not sure how sides were chosen at this point, but I think it was just a switch in nationalities from HF4. In this one, the Americans are attacking along the south edge of the map towards the graveyard near the end of January 10.
Not only is it the usual interesting situation, but the victory conditions are different: The Americans need to control the majority of the graveyard at the end of five turns, and they need to secure the perimeter by making sure there are no Good Order Germans in two buildings (AA13 & X9). Patch was thinking the Americans needed Control of those locations, and set up his Germans with more emphasis on those buildings than might have been wise.
The Germans have a fairly broad area to defend with ten squads (mostly 2nd Line), the usual toys, and one 75L ATG. The Americans have a fairly restricted setup area, but have twelve squads, 2xMTR and four Shermans (half 75W and half 76W). Also the Americans get an automatic Smoke OBA mission. They choose a hex before setup, and then resolve Accuracy (50% here), and only shift it one hex if inaccurate at the start of any one PFPh. My general plan was to secure AA13 immediately, while the main drive got going to the graveyard on the other side of the railroad embankment. X9, I figured I’d put pressure on as I secured the graveyard, and hoped I could just make the location so unlivable that I could break anyone there.
Patch mostly set up north of the embankment, but had foxholes on it, and garrisons in and in front of the graveyard. Pre-game rubble took out three buildings, including AA13. I had thought the Smoke must happen at the start of the game, but that meshed with my plan, so the AR was in AA14, and drifted to BB14, generating Smoke to cover my advance on AA13. One MTR opened up on FF10, and hit to reveal the “?” there as a Dummy. My first move caused Patch to reveal a HS in Z15; my HS survived, but a followup squad broke, but Patch declined FPF at an armored assault into the smoke. The rest of my move generally clustered around that area, but I armored assaulted a stack all the way through the smoke to BB13.
Advancing fire pinned Z14, and I sent a squad plus 8-0 in there. I also advanced two squads into AA13 (leaving a MMG squad and 9-1 under the Sherman). Not only were the odds horrible for Patch in the former, but he rolled a 12, while I knocked them out. AA13 turned out to be a 3x”?” stack of dummies, giving me easy control of the first objective.
Situation, American Turn 1, showing the full board. North is to the left.
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Platt’s book is really about the relationship between Britain and China before the Opium War, and shows why a conflict was unexpected, almost right up to when it did happen.
The two had a stable trading relationship for about two centuries. While the very limited contact (all through Canton) seems repressive, in practice it did mean that everyone involved knew what to expect from each other, and how to keep the goods, and cash, flowing.
Instability arrived on the British side in the guise of opium. Notably, while official British trade stayed away from the substance, the East India Company was doing its best to control the sale of opium in India, and make a big profit from it. However, there was competition from areas not yet under control of the EIC, which led to them competing on price, driving the cost of opium in China down so that it was no longer just available to the rich.
On the Chinese side, there were serious rebellions that sapped much of the available political will, as insane numbers of men and money were spent to put down the White Lotus rebellion, and right after dealing with the ever-growing problem of piracy. The ultimate cause of both is really that the population of China had doubled during the 1700s, while the tax structure meant no more money came in to oversee the greater needs of the greater population; this left the import tariffs claiming a more and more prominent place in the budget.
These combine to create ever-growing corruption in the Chinese government just as they have to deal with a new popular problem: An ever-growing number of people hooked on opium. (This also starts draining silver coinage out of China—historically extremely rare.) The Chinese go through a number of ideas on their war on drugs, including contemplating legalizing opium, before taking a very hard-line stance with a new administrator, who actually starts getting things done. Whether he was really doing enough to start stemming the tide, or just breaking up a couple waves is taken for granted here, but I have my doubts.
Either way, Lin Zexu ended up on a collision course with the latest British superintendent, Charles Elliot, as the EIC monopoly had just been ended (to the immediate benefit of opium smugglers). Elliot was months away from further instructions, did not have as much authority as he generally needed, and increasingly erratic under the strain. Collision was inevitable, and when it happened war followed.
Though the war itself was still not inevitable. Britain fought, on the surface at least, the abstract notions of honor and respect. That other motives lurked under the surface were obvious, and the effort to push the war through nearly caused top members of the government to be censured by Parliament, and may have led to a collapse of the Melborne government.
Overall, the book mostly sticks with the British side of things, partially, I believe, because the two British efforts to send embassies to China that form the beginning parts of the book are much better documented from that side (and still nearly gets stuck in the weeds of conflicting and incomplete accounts). Much of the middle is better on showing the internal challenges of China, but the figures involved never really come to life. The war itself is merely summarized, though Plat points out that the Chinese, operating with a much weaker miliary, didn’t play to its strengths either.
This is the fifth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Stellaris. See the previous reviews here:
Stellaris: Paradox Among the Stars
Leviathans: There Be Dragons Here!
Utopia: No Place Among the Stars
Synthetic Dawn: Synthetic Intelligence
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The second major expansion for Stellaris was announced on Jan 1, 2018, and came out on Feb 22. It continued the idea of large projects from Utopia, and patch 2.0 accompanying the release of Apocalypse was a major rewrite of the basic game.
This is the patch that I initially played the game, and so 2.0 is the version I generally referred to in the original review, and this one will still be primarily concerned with new features. But it is worth noting that the list of major changes in patch 2.0 is practically longer than this review. I’m also noting all the things the expansion currently unlocks, including things like origins, which did not exist at the time of release.
Marauders
A noticeable expansion feature carries on from the fallen empires of the base game, and the stations from Leviathans. A new type of advanced pocket empire can spawn as part of the setup of the galaxy. These marauders are about the size of a fallen empire, and start with many powerful fleets.
Most of the time they are quiescent like the fallen empires, but do take a much more active role. They have a highly violent militarized society, and will regularly extort resources from their neighbors. Not paying up means they send those big fleets after you and shoot up the neighborhood. At the same time, they can also be hired as mercenaries, either loaning a fleet to a regular power, the services of a high-skill admiral, or hired as ‘raiders’ who will target another empire (who is presumably currently at peace with you).
The good news is while much more powerful than an early player empire, they are a long ways down from a fallen empire, and as the game moves into the later stages, regular empires become much more powerful than they are. But they are a real force to recon with through the mid game, and their mid-game crisis event is a good shakeup to the game.
Bigger Ships
The expansion enables two new ship classes. The easier one to get at are titans, large capital ships with their own limit on construction (instead of the ‘pool’ used by all corvettes, destroyers, etc.). Like with the regular ships, getting access to this size requires researching a technology.
However, once that is done, a shipyard starbase requires a special module before construction can be started, so there is a lead time to being able to build them (which of course takes a while) after getting the technology. Once you have the technology, you can always build one titan, the limit goes up from there depending on the empire’s overall naval capacity.
The second new class are colossi, even bigger ships that can only be gotten at by having titans and taking an ascension perk to enable them. They also require a starbase module at a shipyard to build, and have a much harder limit on construction (generally, one).
They also only have a single weapon slot (type “W”) as opposed to titans, which are essentially battleships writ large. These do one thing: destroy planets (or something equivalent). The main version just puts an impenetrable shield on the planet, making it effectively dead, but with a society research bonus, while the world cracker will destroy it, leaving a mineral deposit. There’s another three more specialized variants, plus two more available in combination with other expansions.
A third addition is actually the ion cannon, a special type of defense platform that can be built at starbases (but only at the most advanced, “citadel” type). They eat a number of platform ‘slots’, and have relatively high upkeep, but have the basic type “T” weapon of a titan, and can destroy most ships at extreme range.
Both of the ships are space opera ideas, and pretty much straight out of Star Wars, with the titans being Executor-class star destroyers, and colossi the Death Star. Even titans can be a pain to get to, but despite some tries at giving smaller ships their own things to do, big ships generally dominate everything else in combat, so building titans is always worth going after. I’ve never gotten to using a colossus, since I’m generally content to defeat someone militarily. Though some planets have an amazing number of ground forces….
New Knick-Knacks
There is one new civic available with the expansion: barbaric despoilers. This can’t be removed later, and demands militarist, authoritarian, or xenophobic ethics. It unlocks a couple of fairly marginal effects, but prohibits migration treaties and some federation types.
Two new origins are unlocked by Apocalypse: life-seeded and post-apocalyptic. The former indicates a species was “seeded” there some time in the distant past, and means they start out on a max-size Gaia world with features to generate the three main strategic resources. The latter merely means the empire starts on a tomb world, and there are a few civics they can’t have. It also means they have the survivor origin species trait that grants good tomb world compatibility (but does not give them a tomb world preference), and adds to leader lifespan.
Humanoids
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Humanoids is a species pack to add extra variety to humanoid aliens, featuring new portraits, city art, and ship models. Originally released when species packs were mostly just extra art assets, it has since become a fairly extensive package of new civics, origins, and other traits. It was originally released on December 7, 2017, with patch 1.9.
It includes a new preset empire, the Voor Technocracy. They’re a materialist authoritarian science directorate from an arctic world. They have a good mix of species traits (quick learners, talented, adaptive, and repugnant), but don’t actually use anything specific to the expansion (most of which was added later anyway).
The clone army origin gives an empire whose population is… well, warrior clones, whose original masters have disappeared. They start with cloning technology, and get an archaeological site on their homeworld. The population all get the clone soldier trait, which gives them shorter lifespans, and only reproduce through cloning. They do get a bonus to ground combat, and the trait may be replaced with one of a pair of enhanced versions (clone soldier ascendant/clone soldier descendant).
Three new civics are included. Pompous purists is a xenophobic civic that helps with establishing diplomatic relations, but can only initiate interactions, and cannot receive them. Pleasure seekers can increase population growth and amenities, while allowing the decadent lifestyle living standard (extra upkeep in return for happiness and trade value). Masterful crafters replace artisans with artificers to generate more consumer goods and trade value. With MegaCorp, the last two can be used as the corporate civics corporate hedonism and Mastercraft Inc.
Two new negative species traits are included: psychological infertility is the opposite of existential iteropathy (available in the base game) and lowers population growth during wars and crises. Jinxed increases the maximum number of negative traits a leader can have (a concept not introduced until 3.8 and Galactic Paragons).
These are all secondary, or specialized traits and the like, but it is a large collection, and I recommend getting Humanoids on the strength of all the new options. The original point, art assets, are just an extra bonus.
Conclusion
Under older models of development, patch 2.0 would have been Stellaris II. A lot of the basic underpinnings of the game changed, more than any old, large, expansion would have bothered with. There are people out there who miss the 1.x version of the game, and I can’t speak to that, as I haven’t really played that version. From what I’ve seen, I think the original version was a bit too ambitious, trying to borrow mechanics from every other space 4X game. 2.0 went to an easier to work with system for warfare, and a lot of the changes hang off of that.
In the meantime, the expansion features seem small in comparison, especially as it is supposed to be a major expansion, but it doesn’t add much in the way of new mechanics. But the marauders and titans are really good additions, and I recommend the expansion on their strength.
The final Tomoe Gozen novel is much more cohesive as a novel than the first two. But it is broken into three parts, and they are somewhat independent.
A sad repeat from the second book is that there’s an ad from the publisher of the Kindle version of the book right at the end of part three. And right before a final short story epilogue. This is a really bad habit by Open Road, and needs to stop. If it was before a preview of another book, that’d be one thing, but but this is splitting apart something that’s supposed to be a cohesive whole.
At least they’re not advertising soup.
At any rate, we have more grand adventure in a world of Japanese myth. Tomoe is now a mendicant monk, making her way while trying to atone for actions she now regrets. She is older, and sadder, and no less deadly, even as arthritis starts afflicting her joints.
Of course, this she stumbles into a small province where an ex-samurai will find plenty of things to regret. Much Japanese storytelling is somber, and this book has the tone down perfect, just like the entire series has gotten so much right.
Overall, the pace is often slow, but the fact that this is much more one cohesive whole helps a lot, and I think this is the best part of the series. Overall, it’s well worth a read, and needs to be better known than it is.