Straight Down the Middle

by on September 21, 2015 at 1:00 am
Posted In: F&E

Crossposted from the SFU blog on BGG.

Federation & Empire is about the big 18-year General War centerpiece of the Star Fleet Universe timeline. Fighter Operations, as a descendant of the first expansion to it, mostly deals with some enhancements to the main system (with salvage and a few other things), as well as enhancing the number of options available for carriers, which are a major focus in F&E.

But, it also comes with a scenario for the last major war before the General War, the Four Powers War, which is considered as kind of the end of the ‘Middle Era’ of the timeline, when all the familiar technology has developed (setting it apart from the Early Years), and before all complications of fighters, maulers, war cruisers, and more, familiar from the General War era  have been developed.

The new version of Fighter Operations just coming out focuses more on this era, providing counters for about twenty different ship types that had passed, or nearly so, by the start of the General War. This turns the Four Powers War scenario from just a mini-version of the General War with all the funny ships taken out, into something with a little more character.

In addition, there’s a few modifications to the standard General War setup for the new ships. Most notably, the Klingons get several of their diminutive E4s and E4A escorts replaced with even smaller E3s. Yes, the Klingons are the new record-holder for the smallest regular-service ship in the game, with the 3/2 E3 being smaller than the Hydran 3-4/2 Hunter. They’re placed so as not to cause much actual change in the game, and they all get removed on turn 10 (given to the police), but it does still make the Klingon early-game dismal escort situation slightly worse.

At the same time, the Kzinti have one FF replaced by a FH, an early, not very successful, attempt to upgrade the FF, and the Hydrans have two of their Crusader frigate leaders replaced by the older all-fusion beam Saracen frigate leader. The Lyrans get the option to replace a couple small ships with slightly better versions that can’t be converted into anything else. Since there’s always more FFs and DDs around than ability/desire to turn them into anything else, I can’t imagine the Lyran player will often pass this up (especially the HFF, which is an efficient 5/3 ship).

It’s nice to see the first F&E expansion getting updated for the 2010 edition, but it’s even nicer to see the earlier period getting some attention.

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Levelling in MMOs

by on September 13, 2015 at 3:36 pm
Posted In: MMO

There was a time when hitting level 10 was a big deal. It was time to consider settling down, establishing a keep, and retiring from active adventuring.

2015-09-12_00001My main character in Guild Wars 2 gained 5 levels yesterday.

Now, I will point out that it makes a lot of sense for computer games to have a lot more levels in their structure than any RPG. Gaining a level is something of an accounting exercise, and with the computer handling the numbers, more accounting is not a large burden.

However, MMOs are supposed to be a group activity, and the end game (where levels are no longer important) is where it is easiest to find a large pool of people with the same level of capability. Before that point, unless you are purposefully staying in-step with a friend it can be very difficult to find appropriate content for two people. This helps feed into a ‘must get through everything now’ mentality, that causes developers to warp the design by promoting faster leveling than the content is designed for. This feeds everyone into the ‘end content’, even though that tends to be one of the most tedious parts of the game, and is characterized by extremely slow, incremental gains in ability, instead of constant sense of growth from the main part of the game.

The emerging answer to the underlying problem is level-scaling, first seen in City of Heroes, with the sidekick system. Neverwinter has this for some of their more recent content, but… I can’t say it works. I don’t know what they’re doing when they reduce a character in effective level, but it doesn’t make much difference, with a high-level character tearing through the lower-level monsters. Guild Wars 2 has a much more extensive system, where every section of the world has its own maximum level that you are reduced to. It does have an effect, but while not as pronounced as in Neverwinter, over-level characters are still more effective than ones just at the maximum level.

The most effective, and most annoying, version I’ve seen is in Final Fantasy XIV, which will disable abilities that are too high level for your current effective level. Considering that it has the usual ‘arrange your own ability bar’ style design, having your hand-crafted ability set disrupted gets frustrating.

Back to yesterday’s adventures, the main annoyance I’m feeling is that I’ve been spending a lot of time in the alternate low-level areas (because of map-completion achievements, and a need for low-level crafting materials). Normally, this means extremely slow experience gain, as it gets scaled down for being ‘too easy’. But it seems like Guild Wars 2 does not do this, leading to much faster level advancement than I’m really looking for at the moment. Lunysa is now around level 40, and has yet to see any content past about level 22. I’d really prefer that the level advancement be slower, so I don’t feel like I’m rushing towards an end goal that is not part of what I’m currently doing.

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The Influence of Sea Power Upon History

by on September 9, 2015 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

You could easily write a recursive book about the influence of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History upon history. Mahan wanted to show that navies decided wars, even between land powers, and many powerful and influential people listened. In the list of influential works on strategy it is probably number four, behind The Art of War, The Prince, and On War.

There’s actually a few interrelated theses here. The primary one is the assertion that naval power is a deciding factor for everyone but the most land-locked of countries. The secondary one is not so clearly stated, but quite evident in the later parts of the book, that the proper goal of military operations is the reduction of organized enemy forces in the field. The later parts of the book particularly talk about this, showing that the French government and navy held to theory that saw the taking of objectives while preserving force, and that it time and again failed to gain results, while the British habit of forcing battles inevitably put their opponents into a worse position over time. Lastly, he considers the pursuit of interrupting merchant shipping to be a mistaken strategy, as British trade increased even during wars where the French captured large numbers of British merchants. (The Battle of the Atlantic might be seen as a condemnation of this rule, but I imagine Mahan might argue that the failure to actually hamper the British—and American—navies gave them the ability to find a way to destroy U-Boats and end “The Happy Time”.)

Mahan covers the most of height of the Age of Sail in his book, from the Restoration of Charles II to the end of the Revolutionary War, after an extended chapter that looks at naval power throughout history. This is definitely a preferred era for him, but he considers that while tactics must change over time, with new technology, it is still possible to find strategic truths that always apply, and I think he did so very well. His narrative gets steadily more detailed as it goes on, with the last couple chapters looking at actions in India and the Caribbean from 1781-1783 in great detail. As his descriptions get more detailed, so too do the conclusions that he draws from them. This is decidedly Nineteenth Century writing, and technical in nature to boot, with overly long-winded sentences and paragraphs by today’s standards (thankfully, the page-long paragraph is a thing of the past), but it still retains a high degree of readability.

My copy of the book is an OCR Pyrrhus Press ebook, which is in decent shape. I started noticing errors about a third of the way through, and they slowly become more common as the book went on, but never got to the levels I’ve seen in other books. On the other hand, the tactical description of battles is reliant on a number of maps that are directly referenced in the text, but are not included in this copy. I could generally follow along, but it takes a fair amount of effort it shouldn’t, and the details are lost.

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Free Game Eats Free Time

by on September 6, 2015 at 9:49 am
Posted In: MMO

Guild Wars 2 is now a couple years old, and coming out with their first expansion. Since the game has always been ‘pay once, no subscription’, they’ve decided to make a slightly limited version of the base game free, and encourage everyone to just buy Heart of Thorns, due out in a month.

Smudge and I tried out the game during a couple free weekends two years ago, and kind of bounced off the game. We had a lot of trouble at first, had fun the second day, and then found ourselves frustrated all over again when we came back during the second free weekend. After that, while it was tempting, we just couldn’t go for it, if we needed to re-learn every time.

This last week, we tried again, and… didn’t really have any trouble. It’s been taking us a while to really get up to speed on a lot of nuance, but we didn’t just bounce off the system this time, for whatever reason.

From the first, I thought that GW2 was a very forward-looking design, and I hope that it will be influential in the next generation of MMOs, even when I don’t agree with everything they’ve done.

Questing is where I have the most trouble. There are quest givers who want various things done, do them get a reward. But, you never have to talk to them, just get in range, and a corner pop-up will give the basics of what’s needed, and show a progress bar. The fact that you can do any of a number of things to complete the quest, instead of ‘kill exactly x of critter a, kill exactly y of critter b, and bring me exactly z of this plant’ is great. But, I prefer my RPGs to be heavier on the RP side of things (quest dialogs and conversation trees was the strongest part of SW:TOR, and what I want to see more of), and while you can talk to the quest person, and get a good conversation explaining everything, it is possible to get the complete while doing something completely different, locking you out of that conversation.

Speaking of other things to do, GW2 has a event system that I like. NPCs will go out and do things, get into trouble, and need help. These generally have some good… stage plays to go with them, and are fun, and anyone can join in at any time (many are also specifically kicked off by player action). I’ve come to the realization that these are the real quests in GW2, even though they’re obviously descended from the ‘rift event’ idea of Rift, these are much more dynamic and better thought out.

The map has various things to do scattered around it, points of interest to visit, vistas to see, quests to do. Despite the last being called ‘quests’, they’re really just another type of generally-accessible bit of content to visit. And all these points have done a lot to help get me to explore the world. (Something I like in theory, but often don’t do so well on.) And as it turns out, there’s still plenty of things for the people who like to explore to find that aren’t just part of the checklist, this is just the basics.

Another thing that has taken some re-thinking on my part to understand is character development. The first thing that GW2 shows off is that each weapon you pick up has a completely separate set of skills associated with it, and your character can act very differently depending on what weapon(s) you’re using. After a bit of fun with that, I had disappointment that it doesn’t take long to acquire all the various weapon skills. Deciding what you like, what you want to use and master will take some more time, but the exploration of this neat weapon system is disappointingly short. What I realized is that the idea is to introduce that, then move into various non-weapon skills, and then into specializations, and have your character grow through these different systems. But I’d still prefer to see the weapon skill continue to grow and evolve as you progress.

On the other hand, all of this is instantly changeable. The specializations especially are like the skill trees in traditional MMOs like WoW, but instead of permanently picking a path, you can always rearrange things (starting with your used weapon!) to take on a different role. I just wish you could save off a couple combinations so you can more efficiently go into ‘party healing mode’ or whatever.

So, yeah, I’m enjoying Guild Wars 2 right now. More than I thought I’d be after my first couple experiences.

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Two Rounds of Mantinea (418 BC)

by on September 3, 2015 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: CC:Ancients

Patch and I had another between-bigger-games round of C&C:A Tuesday night. This time was the first Battle of Mantinea from Expansion #6. It’s a large battle with a large number of units and going to 8 banners, and both sides have a special unit. The Spartans have a typically special Aux (always gets hits on helmets and can ignore a banner; can also move two and battle), and the Argives have a heavy unit with five blocks. Both sides also have three leaders, of which one is not attached to a unit at the beginning.

I had the Argives first, and I started edging forward while Patch burned a couple of Order Heavies (the Argive special is the only heavy unit in the scenario). I initially made contact on my right flank, and took light losses while driving off a couple units. Patch came back with Order Four, and managed to wipe out my leader-lead MH in one attack. I didn’t have any great places for him to go, and took a chance by placing him behind the surviving adjacent unit. However, the next attack did two hits and drove him back two hexes—beyond my leader. He then used momentum to get at and kill my leader.

I used a just-drawn Line Command to bring up the intact portions of the army, and on terrible rolls, did five blocks in four attacks, while I lost a grand total of ten blocks (two units down to one each, and two left on the five-block special). Patch then used Clash of Shields to finish off three units for no damage (nothing survived to battle back!).

The only good news was that his center leader was isolated and was attached to a one-block unit, which I finished off, killing the leader. I also weakened a 5-block Spartan MH, and only took a banner on the battle back. Patch used Leadership to move on his left, pursuing my shattered right, taking two hits in the process of finishing off the only medium I had left there. I used Inspired Left Leadership to bring my intact units up on my left, finishing of the Spartan MH, and getting a regular MH on a very lucky four-hit attack.

We reformed a bit, and Patch brought his left flank into wrap around the end of my line, eliminating a weakened unit, but failing to get a full-strength one in two attacks, who did three blocks in return. Not having much else, I moved my remaining intact units into his, and took out another MH, killing the leader with it, and weakening another for two blocks damage. Patch Ordered Three Center to catch the end of my line again, and eliminated it. 6-8

Mantinea-I-1

We spent a couple turns on minor cleanup the second time, when Patch sent his light cav into contact early. I eliminated one outright, and weakened the other at a cost of two blocks. I used Line Command to move the entire right side up, flowing around the remaining LC. I managed to eliminate it, and used Momentum to have an orderly line.

Patch moved his flanks up, and I Ordered Two Left to bring part of the detached left side into contact with him and my main line. I lost one unit on an unlucky battle back, but I did three damage to a unit first. Patch used Mounted Charge to bring the bulk of his line up (once again, Patch gets all the cavalry cards in hoplite scenarios…). This did fourteen blocks damage, wiping out a leader-led Spartan MH and a regular MH, and broke up half my line. However, a lucky battle back wiped out one of his leader-led MH as well.

I reassembled part of my line, and tried to get his remaining leader in the area, but only did one damage and took four in return. Patch used Order Mounted to press in the center, and get his orphaned leader back in play, knocking out two more units, and sending my center leader fleeing again, while taking two blocks in return. I pressed with my line, and three damage in two attacks, losing another unit in the process, while also reducing a separated full-strength MH to one block and forcing it to retreat.

Patch’s center was now full of much reduced units, but he couldn’t find a way to pull out, and used Coordinated Attack to little effect. I used Out Flanked for a series of attacks on weak units, managing to eliminate one of the center ones with its leader, my Aux was killed on a battle back, but my LC eliminated both MHs nearby. Patch then went with Move-Fire-Move, which reformed the spare lights effectively, but only did one block to a healthy unit. I used Leadership to move in and destroy a one-block unit in the center. 8-7.

Mantinea-I-2

Afterword:

This is one of the bigger slugging matches I’ve seen in a while. Lots of medium units, well formed with little terrain means that it’s hard to maneuver enough to do much with the light units that are also present in numbers. The one heavy unit also feels lackluster despite the extra die and block, since it can’t participate in the mounted cards with the MHs. Considering they seem to be extra disciplined hoplites, I’m surprised they weren’t ruled as a 5-block Heavy Hoplite.

The dice definitely turned the first game in Patch’s favor, but I came back stronger than I thought I might. I’m still surprised at Patch’s moving into contact with his LC early; I would have stayed a hex back for archery and dared him to move up or keep suffering arrows.

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