Elizabeth I

by on January 11, 2015 at 10:34 pm
Posted In: Books

The Life of Elizabeth I by Alison Weir, is more ‘the reign of Elizabeth I’, in that it only gives the bare essentials of background before starting with when succeeds to the throne of England at the age of 25. However, Weir has covered the earlier parts of her live in other books, so there isn’t much reason to go into it here.

Past that, it is a biography, and good one too. Weir takes us on a tour of Elizabeth’s life, and talks about her court, her politics, her intrigues, her courting…. Weir usually takes time out to discuss the general conditions of life in the era she’s writing about, but this happens a little unexpectedly in two chapters in the middle of the book, instead of setting the scene at the beginning. There’s a lot of talk about her court, and the people who populate it, and discussions of many of the stories that grew up around her reign. Generally what you expect from a good biography, and handled very well.

In all, a good, entertaining book, and worth a read to anyone interested in Elizabeth I or the Elizabethan era in general.

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Anime Fall 2014

by on January 6, 2015 at 10:10 pm
Posted In: Anime

The latest anime season finished up a little over a week ago, and I’ve been remiss in saying what I thought about it. Overall, I didn’t watch as much stuff, …though the number of episodes may have stayed about the same.

Sword Art Online II — This season was billed as a set of shorter stories, and it didn’t disappoint. As expected, the first story finished up with episode 14, and then the next one was a recap of the previous season. *sigh* Though it was told from the perspective of the new character, which gave it some interest. After that, there was a very nice story arc featuring a return to much of the earlier cast with a quest in Alfheim that leads to questions about how ‘real’ a virtual world is. This theme also underlies the second and final story that was very well done. Overall this is as good as SAO has been since the original story.

Log Horizon II — It’s been a little odd having both “stuck in a MMO” series going this season. But Log Horizon also had a very strong season, with a nice worldbuilding story that also explored Shiroe and Akastsuki at the same time. The worldbuilding just gets better the more you see. Better yet, it’s still going, with some plot threads that need returning to, while SAO II is done.

Yowapeda — It started as such a nice sports/geek series. But as it continues, it keeps dragging itself out more and more, and and is falling right into teenage shonen tropes. I still watch it in the hopes that the current tournament plot will end someday, but I can’t recommend it.

When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace — I’ve only seen about 2/3d’s of this, since Smudge hasn’t been liking it as much (but she laughs anyway). And, it is all in the humor; there are parts of a larger plot in there, but the characters have been purposefully kept out of it.

Over on watching older things, Smudge has gotten me into Fairy Tail. It is in the same brand of long-form shonen fight anime that I generally have no patience for, but this one is holding me. Part of it is that the humor works. Part of it is that the testosterone level is lower than in the others of its type (sure, Natsu charges forward into fights a bunch, but that’s because he likes to fight, not because he’s an overagressive posturing twit… most of the time). Part of it is that it has kept a decent, if slightly slow, pace. I liked the beginning of One Piece, and then it slowed down, and I tossed it. Fairy Tail, after 50 episodes, is still going through distinct story lines without dragging them out to two or three times its deserved length.

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The Second War in the North

by on January 3, 2015 at 11:59 am
Posted In: Computer games

AndrielSmudge and I wiped our broken saves a few days ago, and gave War in the North a second try. The good news is that we had no bugs and got through the end of the game last night. However, we were expecting to have another couple large areas to go through, so this caught us by surprise, and we never did try the two ‘challenge levels’ that opened up a little into the game.

Overall, it’s a good game, and I’m happy to have spent money on it. At the same time, I’m glad I got it on sale.

Mechanically, the game works, though the UI has some problems (managing items, especially when choosing a reward) requires too much futzing around, and we kept ending up with things other than what we intended). The story is not that complicated, but it is an action game first.

There’s plenty of conversations to be had, and they all have pretty good dialog trees, and all the voice actors did a good job. However, the motions for the conversations are all automatically generated, and with a very limited range, so all the people move like animatronics. Also, they went way too heavy with the shading on them, which ends up beating them with an ugly stick (Elrond and Arwen are especially bad in this respect).

On the other hand, all the non-humanoids (mostly great eagles) are very well animated, and really come across as characters.

The look of the game is very faithful to the movies, but at one point Frodo refers to going through the Barrow Downs, which only happens in the book; so that was unexpected. The game has a nice travel map with plenty of locations picked out that never appear in the game, it’s just a vehicle for lore. Someone was certainly in love with Middle-Earth.

I remember seeing some high-profile ads for a year or two before the game came out, and it looked like a high-budget game. The ending credits has a lot of people in it. But the game looks and feels like a budget game. We’re wondering where all the money went (quite possibly on paying big-name actors to reprise their roles for the game; they didn’t get everyone, but they certainly had Ian McKellen).

The combat is good though, and never really bogged down. You’re mostly fighting orcs and goblins, and they come in a few types, but they generally mix those up in different fights, so it’s not just waves of the same thing either. And then there’s Mirkwood….

There was one encounter that gave us some trouble, and I’m not sure how you’d manage it in single player. There’s a ‘defend the gate’ sequence where you need to stop a couple trolls or it’s game over/restart. Since they can knock you down/stun you, it was very hard to keep them from succeeding with the both of us. Considering the NPC character was getting bogged down with orcs, I have to assume you’ll end up trying to stop them both alone in single player.

In general, I recommend getting the game as a light multiplayer action game. Get it on sale if you have at least one other person to enjoy it with. We’re probably going to play again, or at least start to. Smudge wants to fiddle around and see if we can figure out just what causes save games to break at least.

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2014 in Review

by on January 1, 2015 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Life

Another year, and another look back at the year. It’s certainly been a busy one; I seem to have lost track of time completely around September, and am still wondering what’s going on.

The biggest thing for me is, obviously, starting my own business. I got all the paperwork for Fox Den officially filed in July/August, and finally got the first book out in November (after a large number of rounds of editing). This also entailed re-doing my site/blog (with a lot of help from Smudge), as I’ve moved to a WordPress multisite install, which meant ripping out the old install and transferring the existing blog over.

That also meant that it took over the home page of the full site, and Smudge is recommending I transfer everything else into WordPress pages too, but that’s stalled at the moment. Hopefully something will happen with that in 2015. The theme I had been using didn’t play nice with a multisite install, so we re-did that too, and managed to keep the basic look the same. Lastly, I recently re-worked my categorization scheme, a month or two ago and broke ‘gaming’ up into sub-categories for boardgames, RPGs and computer games—my apologies to anyone on LiveJournal for that last, since the converter plugin I use ignored my commands to not repost over there as I updated the categories on the posts.

Looking at the tags on the blog (which did not change) this year, I have 65 posts with: forty-three gaming, twenty-two review, eighteen history, fifteen books, seven reading, C&C Ancients, ASL, four Age of Wonders, Master of Magic, game genres, GCACW, three ArcheAge, Festung Budapest, two bgg blog, SFB, HoMM, Paradox, Dominant Species, Neverwinter, and one each AdCiv, King’s Bounty, Hearts of Iron, War in the North, time travel, 4X, Space Empires, Warlords, anime, Colonization, colonization games, Conquest of the New World, Gold of the Americas, Imperialism, city-builder, economic engine, Pharaoh, Settlers II, EU Rome, Fox Den, Up Front, F&E, vassal, Crown of Roses, DTO, GURPS, azuna, FFXIV, life. (I need to get more consistent with my book review tags.) The gaming subcategories have twenty-five Boardgaming, one RPGs, and seventeen Computer Games. So, I’m now averaging over a post a week, which is where I want to be, but the distribution needs to be a little less… ‘lumpy’.

Financially, it’s been a rough year. I started out on-plan for paying down my credit-card, but this year has been very rough on Baron (whose dad is now in a nursing home), which rippled out through the rest of the household. Add to that that I bought 100 ISBNs for Fox Den during the year (the next tier down is buying 10; buying 100 is cheaper than 20 (2×10), and I know I need more than 10…), and debt is back to about where it was right after buying Azuna last year. It looks to me that I’ll be paying the card down again next year, but I don’t think I’ll be matching the previous schedule.

Misfortune-wise, it doesn’t match a couple years ago where a lot of equipment failed. Well, it doesn’t match the number of things—scale is another matter. As I mentioned earlier, Baron’s dad is now in a nursing home, and this is the end of several months of fighting the system (the system won). I just found out my Aunt Ruth passed away Monday morning, which was a surprise, since she’d been as well as ever at Thanksgiving. I haven’t really seen her enough in recent years to say I’ll miss her, but she is the last remnant of a part of my childhood that I’ll always miss; she lived with my maternal grandparents, right next door, and I spent a lot of time there.

Moving on to the inanimate, the day after I returned from my trip to my parents, my car was in a hit-and-run while parked out front.

Car

Other than having a shot-trap for rainwater, the car is still sound. Thankfully, they missed the taillight and gas cap. I’ve been cheap on my insurance, and without any idea who did it, I’m left paying for it myself. I do plan on getting something done; still need to talk to the regular mechanic.

The apartment we rent is old, and was not a shining example of construction even when new. A while after we moved in, a couple of electrical sockets went out and had to be replaced. A couple weeks ago, the power went out along one wall of the studio and the kitchen—including the refrigerator. The handyman (manager’s husband) came out, traced the problem to a socket that was behind a bookcase, which had a single heater hooked to it. The socket was replaced, and we’ve transferred the heater out to a different socket. This Sunday, the power went out in Baron and Smudge’s bedroom and half of the living room. We then found a scorch mark above a light switch.

A real electrician came out the next day, and opened it up, turned to us and said, “This place could have burned down.” We looked at the open panel, where we could see arcing still going on with everything off and agreed. That has been fixed. But, in both cases this happened in the early morning when nothing was powered on at the point of failure. And, in neither case, did any circuit breakers trip. It’s their job to trip when something like this starts. In fact, I’m not sure any circuit breaker in this place has ever actually tripped. They need replacing. Convincing the landlord/management company is the fun part.

Reading-wise, Goodreads tells me I’ve read 52 books this year, which is the one a week average I shoot for. It’s also way up from last year. One of my goals for this year has been to get back to reading more SF&F, and that has gone fairly well. I’ve still spent a lot of effort on reading history, but my ‘Reading My Way Through History’ project is stalled at 1600, since I’ve been reading a lot of cheap Kindle reprints (which really, really, needed at least a single round of edits) on earlier eras. One of my goals was to start converting ‘less important’ books in my library to electronic versions, but most of the stuff I’ve got is old enough that there’s no electronic version, so that’s failed.

On the other hand, a plan to expand my RPG collection a bit has gone fine. Thanks to some early sales, I have the latest versions of RuneQuest and Pendragon (really meant to review them), and have expanded my GURPS collection nicely. And in fact, that and various computer game sales have been the bulk of my game buying this year. It’d be nice to actually do something on the RPG side, but I’ve had a hard time getting my head back into that creative space.

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McLemore’s Cove

by on December 30, 2014 at 8:15 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark missed gaming on Sunday, but has gotten better, and came over for some long-overdue 2-player gaming. Trying to decide what to do the night before, we gravitated to the GCACW series, and then to Mark’s just-punched copy of Battle Above the Clouds (which I also had on loan at that point). Looking it over this morning, I set up the first scenario, McLemore’s Cove, and after we reviewed the BAC rules (not skipping enough of the Tennessee River rules…) we went at it, with Mark taking the Confederates.

Most of the forces in this 4-turn scenario are inactive for the first turn, so once setup and the like was finished that didn’t take too long. Mark was also a bit cautious, and Negley’s division of the XIV Corps moved back on one of the victory areas after being threatened on two sides.

McLemore 1

The second turn, of course, took a lot longer. I opened with a move south by the XXI Corps, near the north end of the lines. I stuck Palmer’s division too far out, and a couple of lost initiatives later saw the demoralized remnants routing away, having lost three strength points (one during the retreat). Not a good start. I re-aligned the rest of the corps, and things quieted down up there for a bit. I eventually came back to that flank, and moved Wilder’s mounted infantry against the Confederate cavalry units holding his right flank, and the path to a victory area. He won two quick battles, and knocked out both brigades, giving me a much better casualty count.

Down in McLemore Cove itself, I was worried because of the number of Confederates in the area, with only three divisions to hold them off, but an assault from the south failed to go in (a ‘6’ to halt the entire thing), and as Cleburne was just north, to flank the Union position, I sent a division down to flank him, and drove him back with losses. By this time, I finally got an insubordination check (well, it is just a 1/18 chance per activation), and was successful on Buckner’s Corps. (Insubordinate: no assaults, and all movement attacks have a -2 to the attacker’s die roll.) That halted the column coming from the north, and the turn ended with a fair number of exhausted units.

McLemore 2b

We had to put the game away just short of end of turn 3. The Confederates got up Lookout Mountain with the gap I had to open to get at Cleburne, but stopped short of Trenton before a good die roll got a reinforcing unit in there to block him. I got a division around the end of a stream to get at Cleburne’s Division, and sent him back with some minor losses again. I was contemplating going after some of the Confederate victory areas past Pigeon Mountain, but guessed it would take too long, though I might cause more losses crashing through the small regiments holding the ridge.

On the north end, more poor die rolls from the Confederate attacks brought things to a halt with more losses (poor demoralized Palmer from the first day took two fatigue to keep from being able to recover that night either, but at least it was no worse).

The Confederates had Thornton’s Mill for 10 VP, and Campbell for another 10, and while there was going to be some interesting fighting there on the fourth day, it was unlikely I’d retake them (since the VPs are awarded for holding either of two points, and I’d probably just have one of each set). Union losses stood at 5 strength points for 10 VP, and Confederate losses were at 9 for -27 VP. Total: 3 VP, a Union Substantial victory (by one point). I had yet to actually take Summerville, but I was likely to take it on the fourth turn, or cause more casualties in the process.

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