The Great Siege

by on November 29, 2014 at 10:19 am
Posted In: Books

Ernle Bradford’s book on the Turkish siege of Malta in 1565 is not a detailed scholarly study of the subject, though the subject could use one. However, it is a fairly thorough look at the subject from the Hospitallar’s viewpoint. There is some examination of the Turkish and Spanish activities and reasoning, but this is a more minor part of the book, which is focused on the siege itself. There is also a little about the native Maltese, but Bradford points out that their activities mostly only live in local legends.

Crowley’s excellent Empires of the Sea uses this book as his main source for his section on the siege of Malta. In fact, reading most of this book felt very familiar, because Crowley had summarized it down so well. This is kind of disappointing, as I was hoping for a bit more. Still, if you want the story of one of the most hotly contested sieges in history, this is a very good book. Otherwise, I recommend Empires of the Sea, which is more vivid and wide-ranging in subject.

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Two Rounds of Mycale

by on November 27, 2014 at 10:02 pm
Posted In: CC:Ancients

Patch and I returned to Commands & Colors: Ancients Tuesday night, with the Battle of Mycale, from Expansion #6. It’s a very unusual scenario, with a river running straight through the center row of the board, with hills on one end, and seacoast on the other. The Greeks have a substantially heavier army (mostly Hoplites), but with lots of bow infantry on the Persian side. If the Greeks can get into the Persian camps, they get VPs and can convert Persian Auxes to Greek ones. Getting to the camps is a little more difficult….

I had the Persians for the first round, and Patch lead off with Order Mediums and then Mounted Charge to get his main Hoplite line into the river with a one die bonus. I had hit him with archery in between, and got a couple blocks on one unit, and Patch’s dice weren’t as good as mine, so while he got two blocks off a Light Bow and an Aux, and a block off another, I reduced one MH to one block and it retreated, while another lost a block.

I moved up and got another of his units to retreat behind the river, but Patch charged back in with fresh units, I decided to retreat an Aux, and he momentum advanced across to reduce an Aux to one block, but my Med on the river line got two blocks on a battle back. I then used Inspired Center Leadership (with a leader on the dividing line…) to activate that entire flank and push his leader/MH back into the river, while reducing another unit to one block.

Patch came across again, and got four hits with one attack to wipe out a Med, and Tigranes had to flee to a LB that was in one of the camps. The momentum attack wiped out the one-block Aux, and he knocked a LB down to one block as it evaded. I used Out Flanked to try and shift my line together, but Patch Counter Attacked, and brought the Spartan Hoplites into the river on the other flank to begin attrition there. Line Command shifted everything towards his bridgehead, and I knocked out both units across the river, forcing his leader to flee. Patch hit Mardontes twice, and got his Meds down to one block, but he returned the favor on the first attack, and knocked out the one-block unit from the second attack.

I Rallied and rolled mostly Heavies (there aren’t any heavy units in this scenario) and one Medium. I gave Mardontes a second block, put him into the river, and attacked the surviving unit from the previous turn to wipe him out. I then momentum attacked across the river to knock out another 1-block left over. 5-2

Mycale 1

For the second round I Double Timed one group of Mediums into the river the first turn. I wiped out a Bow unit that attempted to hold the line, but took two losses myself. We traded more losses for a couple turns until I Double Timed the second group into the river, but couldn’t do more than trade a block with him. An Order Medium reshuffled my line, and got better results, finishing off an Aux, weakening a Bow, and forcing the one on the extreme flank away from the river. A Move-Fire-Move ended with me mostly behind the river again, and all but one of my Allied MH units down to two blocks or less.

I Rallied and again rolled one Medium (the rest was swords and banners). My flank got a block, advanced, and lost it again for no damage to Patch. He then Ordered Mediums to bring the Medium reserves up to the river line and wiped out two MHs, reduced another, and reduced the only intact one to two blocks for a cost of two blocks on one battle back. Out Flanked got the weakened Med and moved the Spartans up slightly. Patch Counter Attacked to get another MH and knocked two others behind the river.

Despite my luck at rolling for orders so far, I went with I Am Spartacus and got one Light, one Medium and a wildcard. I moved up the entire left flank and got across the river while wiping out a Light and nearly getting an Aux. Patch pushed forward on his left to wipe out a fourth MH but only got three banners on a momentum attack. (That really should have been the game, four dice vs a 1-block unit.) I Ordered One [Heavy] to finish off his Aux on the left. 5-4

Mycale 2

Afterword: Both games were very close affairs, despite the score on the first one. Most of my line was feeling very vulnerable in the first game, and Patch nearly got into one of the camps, and I couldn’t afford him getting an extra unit (much less losing one). Worse, my hand had started good, but had nothing but junk left by the end. And Patch really should have had the second game.

It’s a very interesting scenario. Comments on the CC:A fan site say it’s a punishing situation for the Greeks, and they’re right. Their units are technically better, but the Persians have the range of all the bows, and the river reduces most of the fighting to two dice each.

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War in Fornath

by on November 25, 2014 at 9:38 pm
Posted In: Computer games

Me and Smudge (especially her) have been looking at War in the North since it was announced. The initial reviews of buggyness were disappointing, and the fact that it just seemed to disappear from view after release. But, it’s been on the list.

GamersGate had it on sale recently, so we picked up a couple of copies, and installed them Friday. Trying it out at that point was probably a mistake, since we didn’t force ourselves off until 3:30 AM. After a slow start, it sends you off to the ruins of Fornast, which is one big level that keeps begging you to get the job done.

The general idea is to have three people to play the three main characters, but with two of us and the AI on one, it isn’t too bad. Great enemy detector; he’ll go charging off as soon as they spawn! I’ve been playing Andriel, the elf, while Smudge is playing the ranger, Eradan. The main problem is that everyone has items to interact with and secrets to find. So we’re not getting the secrets from the dwarf, and there seems to be no way to manage his equipment. We can hand him things, and he’ll use them if they’re better, but we can’t really see how good the current equipment is.

GamersGate just sells Steam keys for this game, so we have to go through that. Getting a game together was really easy, as we can invite through Steam friends. Some poor soul wandered in while I was figuring that out and got tossed out as I restarted as a private session. On the other hand, that started an in-Steam voice chat session that you apparently can’t turn off. Which would be fine if we weren’t already on Skype. Which would still be fine if the audio quality wasn’t crap. You know, if Steam wouldn’t keep showing off examples of horrible coding practices, I’d use them more.

We then did a second session on Saturday, and spent a while trying to figure out how to defeat Steam’s in-game chat by using alternate devices for Skype, but Steam ignores their own settings with ‘push to talk’ not working, and at least sometimes it ignores the mic volume control (which is linked to the main system volume control!).

So, with crappy audio, we tackled the next problem. The save game feature is… odd. If I started the session we were at Chapter 1 Part 10. If Smudge started it, we were at Chapter 1 Part 3. Both saves would dump us into a room with an encounter with a troll… which wasn’t where we were. Now, I think that’s the room we were about to enter, but we weren’t actually there. We eventually went with what we had, and with some work downed the troll. There was an encounter at a gatehouse that killed us (second real wipe we’ve had), but we got that on the second try (Smudge commented that it felt much more in control the second time; I don’t think I agree, but we did live). We wrapped up the second session by going back to Bree to get some business done, hoping that quitting there would also keep the save point from being so wacky.

Last night was our third seesion, and staying in Bree didn’t work quite as hoped. When we went back to Fornost, Smudge was in the right place, but I appeared in an area near the beginning of the second night’s session, and there were gates baring my way forward and back, and no access to a travel point to Bree.

However, exiting and reloading at that point worked, with the entire party appearing at the right point, and not with an encounter starting up immediately. From there, we had a few more set-piece encounters and then finally the boss. Or the boss’ minion, as the guy in charge was too busy to be bothered. Tharzog was tough enough though, as he’s capable of two-shotting anyone, and has a bunch of the more competent orcs with him.

It took us six or seven attempts to get him, and a fair amount of cursing. Our best attempt was probably the third one, where we got killed when Smudge ran out of healing potions and Tharzog had barely any health left. Up until that point, it really felt like we were in charge of the fight. The next few fights didn’t go as well, and the final attempt felt more like those to me, even though we did get him down. That ended Fornost, and we wrapped up needing to check in with the rangers on what else is going on out there.

So, the game is a bit buggy on load, and they really needed a better character animator (facial animations are particularly problematic, but a number of walk animations need help). The fully developed cinematic sequences (still in the game engine) are well done though, and the voice acting is good. Also, Beleram, the Giant Eagle, is the best animated character in the game.

Game-wise, it is more fiddly than I’d like. In one long encounter area we went up seven levels, and traded out all the pieces of our gear 3-4 times. (Another annoyance, the character select screen is static, instead of showing the current gear of that saved game.)

But, it is a fun, if fairly simple and action RPG. I haven’t played enough of those to say how the combat compares to others in the same general style, but its simple enough to not be hopeless for me to get somewhere, which is nice. The story itself does feel like it could fit in the cracks around the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, which is really nice (I have some doubts about a dwarf and elf coming together without a lot more bickering, but it makes a lot of sense for game dynamics), and the lore seems spot on.

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Time and Again

by on November 21, 2014 at 12:22 pm
Posted In: Books

Both of my parents read, but they generally read different things. So, when both of them are recommending a book, it’s time to take note. Despite that, I just never could get myself around to trying the copy of Time and Again on my dad’s shelf. I’m not entirely sure why, I know I told myself a few times that I really should get around to it, but I never did.

Well, recently the Kindle edition went on sale, so I bought that and read it, decades late. I had not realized it was an ‘illustrated novel’, and had some trepidation as I started reading it with pages and pages of pure text going by, but indeed, all the illustrations and photographs are there and in good shape, if perhaps a bit small on the screen, so no concerns there. Sadly, there are some glitches in the text, which get more common late in the book; more importantly, the Elevated Railway, “the El”, gets rendered as both “the El” and “the EI” throughout the entire book (if you happen to be encountering this in a sanserif font, that’s ‘ee-el’ and ‘ee-aye’), and obviously missed the proofing entirely.

Time and Again is a time-travel story, and needs a little bit of time travel itself today. It was originally published in 1970, and does show that we’ve come a ways in the last 44 years (poof! another hundred grey furs). The attitude to women in the workplace has gotten better, and of course there’s nary a computer to be seen at the beginning in a job that has gone all digital today. The concerns about the world have moved on a bit, and while there’s a fair amount of suspicion about just what a secret government project may get up to, it’s not axiomatic that it will be nothing good, either.

Time and Again is a celebration of New York City, and Jack Finney spends a lot of time bringing it to life in its pages. More to the point, he spends a lot of time bringing the New York of 1882 to life. Both the New York of 1970 and 1882 are there, but of course, the 1882 version needs a lot more work to understand. Time travel in this story involves… ‘letting go’ of everything you know about what makes today today, and filling yourself with the world of where you’re going to. This book is of course a few hundred page exercise in doing exactly that.

At any rate, it is successful on that level, and tells a good story while it is at it. Much of the middle of the book is more of a travelogue in the tradition of the past is a foreign country, and the enthusiasm carries the book out of a somewhat slow start. At the end, it falters again as poorly handled moralizing comes to the fore for about a chapter. Finney (through his main character) is too harsh on the world of 1970; even while he notes the very real problems of 1882, he misses the fact that they were every bit as bad or catastrophic from their point of view as the problems of 1970 are for him. Thankfully, the travelogue and a mystery are the real focal points of the book, and they are served well.

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Moving Away From 4X

by on November 17, 2014 at 4:37 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This was originally going to be a completely different essay, but I’ve realized it’s past time to tighten up my definitions some, so I’m not continuing having to stop and figure out/explain pieces of my foundation just so I can say something coherent. This really should have been the first post in the ‘game genre’ series. Well, second would have been acceptable.

So, now to talk about what’s been the elephant in the room, the 4X genre. Borrowing from Wikipedia:

The term “4X” originates from a 1993 preview of Master of Orion by Alan Emrich, in which he rated the game “XXXX” as a pun on the XXX rating for pornography. The four Xs were an abbreviation for “EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate”.

….

While many strategy games arguably contain a similar “explore, expand, exploit, exterminate” cycle, game journalists, developers and enthusiasts generally apply “4X” to a more specific class of games, and contrast 4X games with other strategy games such as Command & Conquer. Hence, writers have tried to show how 4X games are defined by more than just having each of the four Xs. Gaming sites have stated that 4X games are distinguished by their greater complexity and scale, and their intricate use of diplomacy beyond the standard “friend or foe” seen in other strategy games. Reviewers have also stated that 4X games feature a range of diplomatic options, and that they are well known for their large detailed empires and complex gameplay. In particular, 4X games offer detailed control over an empire’s economy, while other strategy games simplify this in favor of combat-focused gameplay.

The next thing to note is that I both agree with the fact that ‘4X’ adequately describes the course of a wide range of strategy games, and that I tend to define it even more narrowly than the restrictive game journalists. Because of the initial definition of “4X” with MoO, I always associated it with space conquest games. Part of this is also from the fact that the standard 4X cycle is implicit in the nature of space-based wargames. The standard idea, from Stellar Conquest and StarWeb on, is to start with one planet in a big, unknown universe, explore it, claim and settle it, build your empire into a powerful economic force, with which you can eliminate the other players and win the game.

In fact, MoO itself subverted this already existing style with its diplomatic model, and the ability of the game to end without conquest (the Galactic Council vote). For me, 4X naturally already meant games that strongly relied on this cycle without fiddling around with ‘greater complexity’ or ‘intricate diplomacy’ as differentiators, and I would indeed say those don’t make an adequate definition. Reach For the Stars is not that complex compared to many strategy games, and there is no in-game support for any diplomatic status other than ‘war’. But it is a space 4X game.

The heart of the 4X game is the interplay of discovery (explore), colonization (expand), development (exploit), and warfare (exterminate). I’ve touched on the role of colonization in some strategy games already, and should probably tackle those subjects explicitly soon.

But for the overall definition of ‘4X’: Command & Conquer (to use Wikipedia’s example) has you explore the map, and Tiberium fields are one of the things you look for. Then you send units out to get the Tiberium, and get it to your base so you can build more units to kill the enemy with. Sounds fairly 4Xish. And it is. As Wikipedia then points out, it can get hard to say many typical combat-heavy games are not 4X games without a lot of hair-splitting and tightening of definitions.

But I would say the difference is the hair-splitting of scope and emphasis. In fact, it has to be, as everything we are talking about here belongs to the general category of ‘games about being rude neighbors and wanting their stuff more than they do’ (and 4X, no matter how defined, is a subset of that). My first rough breakdown, with the genre labels I tend to like using:

  • Wargame
  • (Base-building) RTS
  • Fantasy Conquest
  • (Space) 4X
  • Empire Management
  • Civilization

There’s more, and overlap, and complications, but that’s enough to be going on with. I’ve also arranged them in something of a sliding scale with games that have detailed combat and little else at the top, and games with simple combat a lots of other detailed systems at the bottom.

There’s some strangely specific ideas mixed in with some very broad ones. Of course, these are meant to be… real genres—genres where there are a number of different games that center around similar ideas or mechanisms, even if that is a fairly lumpy distribution. The main standout from that viewpoint is wargames, which is a superset genre with a long and varied history in both board and computer games, and has plenty of sub genres, like hex-and-counter, CDG, area-impluse, and so on. The definition in this list says they are games with combat, and no real economic or diplomatic systems. Risk fits here as easily as War in the East, but Third Reich starts separating out and moving down the list. That will sound a bit strange to an old board wargamer, but helps with the more general discussion I hope to continue soon.

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